Tuesday - Project Management
Building a Website is a project. That means you are putting together something complex using a number of relatively simple components - in this case, you are building a Website by coding a number of Web pages that will all link together to tell a single story. No matter what topic you choose to code, I want you to think of it as a single story you are trying to tell. At the end of the semester, you will submit your completed project as part of your final exam for the course.
Projects require planning and discipline - two things teenagers hate to employ. I sympathize with your resistance, but to quote an old sci-fi trope: resistance is futile. Whether you want to or not, you will have to plan out your site and exercise discipline while coding it, or else it will never get done and you will fail the final exam.
All that gloom and doom aside, however, it's not as bad as you might think. I will allow plenty of in-class time for you to work on your project and I will structure much of it for you. Here are the steps involved in managing this project:
- Choose a topic (think of something that interests you and yet doesn't already have a professional presence online)
- Submit a pre-proposal with this topic, so I can give you feedback
- Identify at least 4 different subtopics related to it
- Draw a map of all the separate Web pages that you will need
- Determine what style of navigation menu you want to have (I'll show you a bunch of options and you'll pick one)
- Determine colors, fonts, and page layouts
- Write a list of tasks that, when completed, will result in your Website
- Draft a schedule (on a calendar) of each task
- Write a detailed proposal, including a budget (time) and deliverables, and submit it to me for approval (we will both sign it once we agree on the specifics)
- Update your schedule as you complete each task
- Save a backup copy of your complete Website every time you update your schedule
- Turn in your completed Website, which I will grade against the proposal you wrote and we both signed
And that's it. Before you know it, the semester will be over, so you will rely on this schedule to ensure you stay on top of the required work. Remember: your website doesn't need to be amazing, it needs to be DONE and it needs to incorporate a wide variety of the code we've learned in class. The more thought you put into each decision, however, the happier you'll be with the final result, and the prouder you will be when I include it in the next Festival of the Arts for the entire community to see. The best projects are those in which the developer (that's you) regularly checks in with the client (that's me) to ensure that the project is meeting client expectations. Some of that I will force by approaching you and asking, but you will benefit most from coming to me when you make major decisions and need to know whether you are heading in a direction that will produce the right results.
Ordinarily, you would scale the features, function, and scope of the Website to match the budget the client is willing to meet. Because you do not yet know how much time it will really take you to build your Website, do not worry if halfway through the semester we sit down and rescale your project so that it makes better use of the time allotted.
To help you along a little, here are some common topics chosen by other students:
- sports
- music
- food
- fashion
- computer games
- movies/books/storytelling
- family
- politics
- school
