The files that comprise your Project 2 should be on your Clayton State Web site, readable using Mozilla Firefox, by the beginning of class on the date listed on our Schedule page.
Content
Selecting your site
Your project will analyze the web site of a U.S. food bank that distributes at least 20 million pounds of food annually. (This size limit is intended to make sure the web site is extensive enough to serve as a valid object for your analysis.) To find and choose your site, you may use Feeding America's Food Bank Locator. After you select a particular state or zip code, the Locator will return a listing of food banks, their web sites, and their annual distribution totals. Once you select your site, claim it by sending the food bank's name and URL to our class mailing list.
Note that you may not choose the Atlanta Community Food Bank, or any site that already has been claimed by another student.
Writing your analysis
To analyze both good and bad aspects of the site's design, you will apply the guidelines presented by Curtis, Gabriel-Petit, and/or Horton and Lynch. Specific and detailed information from both our texts and from the analyzed site should be cited and incorporated into your argument. Don't waste time on minor points: your analysis should emphasize the most important elements presented by our texts.
Recent projects by Jennifer Sawyer, Melissa Rolle, and Shana Latimer provide useful examples of what CMS students have done in the past. Please note that these projects responded to different directions, and that none of them is perfect; use their choices as a spark for your own creativity rather than blindly copying aspects that may not be effective writing or design.
Color Harmony page
In addition to your complete analysis, you should create a separate page that identifies and explains your color choices for the project. This explanation will benefit from citations of Horton and Lynch, Gabriel-Petit, Eiseman, and/or Curtis's discussion of themes and concepts. This page should be called "analysis-colors.html" and should be in your analysis folder. A link on your 3710 home page, "Web Analysis Color Choices," should open the page.
Minimums
The minimum (i.e. "C" level) length for your analysis is twelve detailed paragraphs of six to eight sentences each. This will include the two introductory paragraphs that will appear on your home page. In addition, your project must include at least five separate html pages and five screen shots from the analyzed site that illustrate your major points. Finally, links to relevant pages within the analyzed site must be included.
Format
In general, the project should conform to the guidelines for good design as presented by our texts. Your interface should be clear and aesthetically pleasing. Use colors and graphics that reinforce a professional tone and that do not interfere with the text.
Your pages must use HTML5. All words must be spelled correctly, and links to pages outside of your analysis should open in a new window. All hyperlinks to internal documents must be relative.
Color Harmony
Your color choices should reflect a sophisticated undertanding of color harmony as presented in our readings. You may choose any of the nine principal methods of achieving color harmony discussed by Gabriel-Petit. In choosing your colors, the Color Scheme Designer tool may be helpful.
Citation
You should use in-text parenthetical citations to credit the authors. Use page numbers for Curtis and the Web Style Guide. Here are examples:
- Curtis depended on inspiration from the Swiss designer Josef Müller-Brockmann to focus his re-design on the beauty of precision and simplicity (115).
- The authors note that designing flexible-width layouts is in many ways more challenging than designing fixed-width layouts (Horton and Lynch 191).
Your project pages should be placed in a folder called "analysis" located within the "3710" folder in your Clayton State Web site. Your 3710 home page should include a prominent link called "Web Site Analysis" that takes readers to the opening page of your analysis.
Grading
Projects will be evaluated using the CSU Writing Guidelines. See the link in the blue bar for the basic Guideline standards. The project will earn a letter grade for each of the Guideline's three components:
- Content,
- Organization,
- Mechanics, Grammar, and Style.
No project earning a D or lower in any of the three components may earn an overall grade higher than D. Once this basic standard is met, the project's overall grade will be determined by an average of the three component grades.
Content
To earn a C or higher in this component, the project must meet or exceed all of the requirements detailed in the "Content" and "Format" sections above.
Organization
Every page of your analysis must include the "Who, What, Where, When" information necessary to orient readers on the Web, including an appropriate page title, top-level <h1> heading, and subheadings. In addition, your site should conform to the organizational standards presented in the Web Style Guide and MTIV. See particularly the WSG discussion on "chunking" information as well as the chapter on site design. Your pages' navigational tools should be obvious, easy to use, and logically structured for your readers' needs.
Mechanics, Grammar, and Style
All links must work. To ensure that this is the case, test your completed project on someone else's computer. [Because of a software glitch, Dreamweaver sometimes creates absolute links pointed at files on a particular C drive rather than creating the properly relative links. If you fall victim to this error, your links will seem to work on your computer, but they will be broken on everyone else's.]
Spelling: Dreamweaver includes a spell-checker, accessible under the "Commands" menu. Use it.
Punctuation: The basic rules of punctuation must be followed. Please note that American style requires placing commas and periods inside quotation marks. For models of these conventions, refer to books published in the United States.
Sentence Structure: The basic rules of grammar and sentence structure must be followed. Ask a friend or family member to read over your final draft before the due date.
Style: Clarity, conciseness, and concreteness are vital for Web-based communication. In addition, your language should convey and maintain a professional tone.