Build a website plan with PowerPoint and Visio
Learning Objectives:
- Overall objective: Prepare a system-analysis-and-design presentation
for your website project:
- Choose a topic for your website project
- Set goals for the project to accomplish
- Decide what content to put in your website
- Plan how to break the content into pages that your website will link
together.
- Technical objectives:
- Learn to create an attractive set of PowerPoint slides that use simple
animations such as slide transitions and bullets that appear one-at-a-time
- Record audio clips and attach them to the slides to prepare a self-paced
presentation
- Use both Visio and PowerPoint to build drawings with intelligent drawing
objects.
- Master enough other PowerPoint features to become comfortable
using the program.
Instructions
Prior to starting actual construction of a substantial development project,
your first task should be prepare design and analysis documents. This is similar
to creating a blueprint prior to starting to build a house. In the design and
analysis phase, you should think through the target audience and overall goals,
sketch out the structure of how things will fit together, collect sources of
information, and prepare samples of how the finished product will look.
This assignment asks you to perform this sort of system design and analysis
by building a PowerPoint slide presentation. When
the assignment is graded, my grader will look to see if your slides and drawings
meet the specific technical requirements listed below. You are encouraged
to be creative, but be sure your work contains all the required elements listed
in the Requirements section below. Another way
to understand what your presentation should contain is to use PowerPoint to open
sample.ppt and use Visio to open
sample.vsd.
You should start by choosing an organization or business that will be the
focus of your website project. The Website Project
assignment contains ground rules for choosing your website topic. This
choice will help you prepare the title slide. You may also want to look at some
website projects completed by
students in this class in prior terms.
Once you've chosen a website topic, your next task will be to think through
what goals you have for the website. How will this site add value to the
organization? How will it change or improve what the organization currently
does? These goals will become a slide or slides which follow the title slide.
Once you have decided on the site's goals, you need to decide what kinds of
web pages the project should have and how all the pages should be linked
together. This information will become the basis of two slides with drawings
that show your proposed page structure. You will create the first of these
slides by using PowerPoint's Autoshapes. To help you learn how to build this
slide, I recorded a Page Design Video.
This is a large file, so expect it to take a minute or two to begin playing. You
will create the second of these slides by using Visio to create a drawing, and
then you will copy-and-paste the drawing into a PowerPoint slide. I want you to
create two drawings of how your website will function primarily to have you
compare how the two draw programs function.
Next, you should mock up a web page to show what a sample page in your
website will look like. Use PaintShopPro (or some other screen-capture
utilities) to snap a picture of your sample web page, and put a copy of this
page into a PowerPoint slide.
At the end of your PowerPoint slides, I want you to create bibliography slide
that discusses the sources of information that you expect to use when creating
your website.
Finally, I want this series of PowerPoint slides to be annotated with your
comments. To do this, you will record a series of sound files: one sound file
for each slide. These sound files should be built into the slide transitions;
that is, they should play automatically whenever the viewer moves from one slide
to the next of your presentation.
- Title slide: The title slide should use large, clear text to state
the presentation's topic. In smaller text, put your name (but make sure this
text will still be easily readable text from the back of a classroom). Remove
any bullet from the paragraph storing your name. Finally, put an appropriate
graphic somewhere on the title slide that you retrieved from the Internet.
Arrange all these elements in an attractive manner.
- Website goals slide (or slides): After the title slide, prepare one
or more slides that describe what you want your website project to accomplish.
Identify the website's target audience, and explain what the site needs to do.
Think through what the site needs to do to add value to the organization. Be
creative in this step: well begun is half done. The bullets on these slides
must build one at a time, with a new item appearing each time you press the
space bar or click the mouse. (If you view your PowerPoint file using
Microsoft's Internet Explorer as your browser, you should know it does not
play back PowerPoint files as well as PowerPoint plays them by itself. Thus,
the bullets may only animate with cursor keys rather than the space bar.)
- PowerPoint page design slide: The next slide must contain a
PowerPoint drawing that
shows the various pages you intend to put in your website project. The
content you put in this slide should reflect what you expect to use in your
website project, but you should feel free to change your mind about that
project later. I want you to prepare this slide to prompt you to think about
the website project, not to hold you to a specific approach.
- Visio page design slide: The next slide must contain a second
page design drawing constructed with Visio. After
you have built the Visio drawing, copy-and-paste it into a PowerPoint slide.
This drawing does not have to show an identical page structure to the one
constructed in PowerPoint. Instead, the two drawings could show two
alternative ways of building your website.
- Sample web page: The next slide should contain an image of a sample
web page for your website project. To build this page, I recommend using
Microsoft FrontPage to mock up a quick sample of what you might want your
website to look like. (Acceptable shortcut: If you
feel pressed for time or are uncomfortable at this point of the term using
FrontPage to build a web page from scratch, feel free to capture an image of
your Treasure Hunt page.) Once again, when you construct the actual
website later, you should feel free to ignore or extensively revise the actual
design from what you used as your sample. I recommend capturing this image
with Paint Shop Pro, but you can use any other screen capture utility (such as
pressing [Alt]-[Print Screen], which places the current screen image in the
Windows clipboard).
- Bibliography slide: The last slide must list expected sources of
information for your website. For this assignment, you can simply make up the
expected sources from your imagination--no one will audit to verify that the
sources are valid or reasonable.
Other requirements:
- Use Sound Recorder (which can be found with a
Start--Programs--Accessories--Sound Recorder command) to record a sound file
for each slide in your presentation. As a example, try listening to
slide1.wav.
- Store these files in your Classwork\BA271 folder as files named
slide1.wav, slide2.wav ...
- For each slide in your presentation, give a Slide Show -- Slide
Transition command and adjust its "Sound" portion of the dialog
box to play the relevant sound file. You will need to scroll down through
the available sounds and choose "Other sound ..." from the bottom of the
list. This should bring you to a dialog box that will let you select the
sound files you created with Sound Recorder. Thus, the third slide your
presentation should have a slide transition that plays slide3.wav.
- Make sure you follow the instructions in the previous paragraph
exactly. PowerPoint will allow you to insert sound files in other ways.
For example, PowerPoint will let you give an Insert -- Movies and Sounds
-- Sound from File command, and if you use this command, my grader won't
be able to hear your sound files (even though you can hear them), and you
won't get full credit for your work.
- Use the Student Page
listings to test your work and make sure the sound files begin playing
automatically when each slide appears. You should know that Microsoft's
Internet Explorer browser does not play back sounds correctly. When playing
back slides through this browser, sounds stutter; that is, they begin to
play, stop briefly, and then begin to play from the beginning again. So
don't let this program's quirks cause you concern.
- Make your slides and drawings attractive. Part of your grade on this
assignment will be based on our entirely subjective assessment of the quality
of your work.
We will grade your work on the network, so putting your work in the expected
location for grading is a critical step. To help my grader find your work:
- Save your PowerPoint file in your Classwork\Ba271 folder with your User
ID account name. For example, if your User ID is SULDR123, then save your
PowerPoint file as .../classwork/ba271/suldr123.ppt.
- Save your Visio file in your Classwork\Ba271 folder with your User ID
account name. For example, if your User ID is SULDR123, then save your Visio
file as .../classwork/ba271/suldr123.vsd.
- Then use the Student Page listings
to check that your work is stored in the required locations.
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