Course Project: Part 1—Website Planning

Course Project: Part 1—Website Planning

This week, you will start a course project. For this project, you will design and develop a small website for a travel company. You will develop this website across the span of the course, building new project components each week, until you have a live, hosted website at the end of the course.

This project is designed to replicate real-life situations where the clients provide only a few of their requirements and expect a prototype to be developed.

Scenario

Express Holidays is a tourism company that designs and provides package tours to various destinations. It is a well-established company but has no online presence. The company wants you to develop a prototype of their website.

Express Holidays wants you to research and present information in an innovative way. The focal points of their website are vacations and tourism. You can apply your discretion while defining the audience, but you should do this early in the project.

The company wants you to develop five pages for its website by using the following details:

• Home page: This page should contain information about the company and should be saved with the file name index.html. This is the first page to load in the browser when the website is accessed by a user.
• Three distinctive destination pages: These three pages are up to you and your creativity. You can show tourist destinations with which you are familiar or ones that you can imagine. However, you need to make sure that you supplement the destination pages with images—these can be any royalty-free images available online, photos that you have clicked, or photos which you are permitted to use.
• Contact page: This is the page using which a user can send Express Holidays a message. For this page, initially, you will design a form that the users would fill. By the end of this project, you will implement a solution that processes the form and sends Express Holidays an e-mail message with the form contents.

This project involves researching; collecting information, such as graphics, video, and audio; and designing, creating, and hosting the website on a web host, such as godaddy.com. As part of the project, you will also suggest ways of maintaining and promoting the website after it is complete. As this is a prototype, you should largely use freely-available information and graphics and spend a considerable amount of time in website designing and project execution.

In Week 1, you will plan the project, identify the tourist destinations to be shown, and collect the text, graphics, and other information that you intend to include in the website.

In Week 2, you will finalize the multimedia elements to be used in the website and decide on the branding options for pages of the website.

In Week 3, you will create three design alternatives for the website interface. You will also determine the final design for the website and create the home page by using HTML.

In Week 4, you will complete the development of all the planned pages for the website.

In Week 5, you will finalize the website and host it online.

Week 1 Tasks

Using Microsoft PowerPoint as a design tool, create a plan for the website. To do so, perform the following tasks:

• Put together a set of questions for the client that need to be addressed before you can start designing and developing the website. This would give you enough information to plan the website without getting into its technical details. Try to be comprehensive but succinct. Come up with questions that can extract relevant information for planning the design and development and for creating an initial prototype of the website. Group your questions under various categories such as quality, scheduling, and workflow.

Your questions may include:

• Who is the intended audience?
• What milestones should be planned in the design phase?
• What branding should be used for the website?

Decide on the tourist destinations you want to cover. Then, perform the following tasks:

• Create a sitemap for the website. A sitemap includes the titles and file names of all pages in a website. For example, each website should have a home page saved with the file name index.html. You can assume that in this website, each page will link to all other pages.
• Name the pages and determine the file names to be used when you create the website in HTML. This is to ensure that the links within the website work properly.

Collect the text and graphics for the destinations. You can pull these together from the Internet or from your personal photographs or from images that you are permitted to use. Ensure that you use only copyright-free material.

Decide on the information you want to present on the pages of the website. You may also need to get imaginative when presenting this information. Create one PowerPoint slide for each page to showcase the text and images. Plan to include two paragraphs of text on each destination page as well as on the home page. Note that the contact page will contain a form that you will design later.

Create a slide to depict the basic layout of the pages in the website. You can use placeholder images or shapes for depiction. You want each page to have the same basic appearance, which should include:

• A new logo
• A banner
• Navigation elements to link to other pages
• A content area that will change across pages

Cite any sources in APA format.