website development in internet marketing

Internet Marketing 470 TT 0800 - 0915, 0930 - 1045 in Showker lab fall 2007

exercises

grades

Developing a website is a creative, time consuming exercise. The object is to create an engaging experience for visitors. One of our learning objectives for this course is to develop basic skills in good site development. We'll use Dreamweaver MX 2004 to develop our own sites hosted on the student.jmu.edu server. This is our project for the semester. It comprises 30% of your grade for this course.

This is an opportunity to engage your imagination in service to your creative flair. The only constraint in this work is that your purpose must not be to offend. Rather, your imagination should strive to educate, inform, encourage, inspire, entertain, and/or challenge.

Following are some noteworthy examples of interesting, and arguably engaging, web sites produced by non-professionals (people who don't earn their living building websites). These sites were created during the spring 2007 semester by sophomores in Dr. Rick Mathieu's COB204 class. The creators used online tools provided by Google. We use Adobe's Dreamweaver MX 2004.

There's probably no such thing as a perfect site. None of these five are. What the five share is creativity in their content. We consider what's good about these five designs and specific ways by which each might be improved.

The nature of your site may be one of two types:

digital music or
a hobby, sport, or some leisure time activity to which you're committed: collectibles, surfing, flying, travel, music, technology, etc.

Click here to view and/or download this 3 pp. Word doc describing the details for this project. It's vital to your grade on this project that you understand and comply with these instructions.

Whichever direction you choose, your site must satisfy the design requirements, technical and non-technical, identified in this table. All the requirements are detailed in the Word doc instructions.

	project site design features
points	technical	non-technical	points
3	pages load and display properly	engaging content for relevant audience	5
3	links work; there are no 'dead ends'	consistent 'look and feel' throughout	4
3	unique page titles	content easy to consume	3
3	unique page description & keywords metatags	intuitive navigation	3
3	alt tags for all images	contact & update information in footer	3
2	visitor ability to interact online with site developer	privacy policy	2
1	images display using 'img src' code (not inserted)
1	cascading style sheet for 1 or more design features
1	library, .lbi, file as nav bar - footer on every page