To develop skills in online marketing we need something to market online.  That something is a web site that each person or two person team is going to develop.

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.  This work 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, sell 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).  Some were created during the spring 2007 semester by sophomores in Dr. Rick Mathieu's COB204 class.  The creators used online tools provided by Google.  The others were created by those enrolled in this course fall 2009.  These all represent good work, the beginnings of some potentially very good sites.  What they share is creativity in their content.  I offer these as examples of some good work, in design and content, that can be done by non-professionals.

from COB204 fall 2007	from MKTG470 fall 2009	MKTG470 spring 2010
Memorable Melodies	trusty nemesis	Michelle Goydan's blog
Commercial Tunes	SAM 4 PRODUCTIONS
Big Ten Fight Songs	nicole's designs
	Sound Artist

Whatever the nature of the site you choose to develop, one of our purposes is to try to generate one or more revenue streams.  In other words, we're developing 'dot coms'.  Actually, a .com or .biz.  You may develop a site devoted to virtually anything of interest to you.  The only constraint is that it's not mean spirited, it doesn't attack anyone or any group, and it's not pornographic.

Whichever direction you choose, your site must satisfy the design requirements, technical and non-technical, identified in this table. 

	project site design features
points	technical	non-technical	points
10	pages load and display properly	engaging content for relevant audience	8
10	links work; there are no 'dead ends'	consistent 'look and feel' throughout	8
10	unique page titles	content easy to consume	8
10	unique page description & keywords metatags	intuitive navigation	8
10	alt tags for all images	contact & update information in footer	5
5	visitor ability to interact online with site developer	privacy policy	5
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 *
58			42
	* if Dreamweaver is used or your site host's CMS enables this

A web site requires a host, a web server.  You've done an exercise for which you created a web page that's hosted on a server here in the College of Business.  For this project we're using a commercial host on which we have to rent space.  Fortunately this is very inexpensive or this work would not be a required part of our course.

site hosting  There are a lot of commercial hosts.  A good place to learn about them, about what they do and the variety of services offered, and a good place to get reliable reviews and recommendations is TOPHOSTS.com.  Being very interested in this and being a good citizen, I've done some of the work for you.  I suggest using 3Essentials or Aplus.net.  You'll find that TOPHOSTS ranks Aplus 2nd among all the hosting services it reviews.  You're welcome to explore alternatives and use another service if you prefer.  I've had a very positive experience with Aplus.

hosting plan  The plan we'll use with either 3Essentials or Aplus is a 'Business' plan.  On the 3Essentials home page click on 'Shared Web Hosting', then 'Windows Hosting'.  The plain vanilla 'Business' plan is the one, not Business-10 or Business-25 (You're elcome to sign-up for either of them, but you don't either for our purpose in this course.

From the Aplus home page, click on 'View Hosting Plans' on the left.  Under Business click on 'Learn More'.  This describes the features you get with this plan.  You'll need to rent space through the end of April.

domain name You need a domian name for your site.  So you know what you're doing you need to read all the content provided here on our course site @ domain names.

site building tools  3Essentials and Aplus, and many other hosts, provide all the tools needed to build a very good web site.  You may also build your project site using Dreamweaver with either of these and many other hosts.

Not being professional web developers, among the more important features we're interested is the content managment system(s) (CMS) the host offers.  3Essentials and Aplus offer several. 

The reason I got an account with 3Essentials is because it offers a CMS called DNN, an acronym for DotNetNuke, a Microsoft technology.  DNN is a very robust CMS, by which I mean it enables the user, the site developer, to exercise complete control over every feature of the site's rendering in a browser.  If you're into site development, enjoy the nature of the work, this is what you want.  But it's not necessary for the most essential ingredient of any web site: content.

If you're interested in using DNN as your CMS for this project (ANd I encourage this but don;t require it.), visit DOTNETNUKE and click on the red button in the middle right with the label 'New to DotNetNuke?'  Watch the 'Video Introduction to DotNetNuke'.

You need to register a domain name for the site you're building for our web development project.  Read about registering a domain name so you undersand what this is about and what you're doing when you pay for the legal right to use a domain name.