Fall 2007 BA271 Midterm Exam

Overview

During this exam, assume that you work for Simpson Advertising, a marketing firm that prepares promotional materials and websites for clients in the Corvallis area. You have been approached by a potential client, Corvallis Hardware, about building a website for their computer hardware sales business. You are going to:

• Use Nvu to build a three-page website prototype.
• Write an essay in one of the website's pages
• Use PowerPoint to build a two-slide presentation.

As usual for my exams, if things appear unclear, feel free to ask me questions. On the other hand, the whole point of this exercise is to see how well you can complete these tasks on your own, so I will not help you perform the exam's actual tasks. 

Construct a Three-Page Website (15 points)

Open Nvu and construct a three-page website for Corvallis Hardware. Be sure to build this website at p:\classwork\ba271\midterm, as shown in the nearby image. Adjust the website's structure, page headings, page titles, and file names to match the images shown at the right. Thus,

• The file names should be index.html, marketing-promotion.html, and essay.html.
• The page titles should be Corvallis Hardware, Marketing Promotion, and My Essay about Camcorders.
• The three page headings should be
   -- Corvallis Hardware -- Home Page
   -- Corvallis Hardware -- Marketing Promotion
   -- Corvallis Hardware -- My Essay about Camcorders

Paint a logo (5 points)

Use PaintShopPro or some other Paint program to create a quick and crude original drawing of a dog (it should not be identical to the one at the left). Adjust the image's background to be transparent similar to the image on the left. Save your painting as p:\classwork\ba271\midterm\images\dog.gif. You will use this image as a logo for Corvallis Hardware.
 

Create the website's Home Page (20 points)

Edit the website's Home Page (that is, the Index.html file) so it looks like the image below.  

Here are some of the steps you will need to do to complete this task:

• Enter Corvallis Hardware as the page title.
• Enter Corvallis Hardware -- Home Page as an H2 heading.
• Use Word Art to create a "Doggone Good Hardware" heading. If you have trouble with this step, you may want to play this video.

  Using Word Art to create a quick 3D logo for your website (5 minutes)

• Create a link bar with relative hyperlinks to all three pages in the website.
• Use a two-cell table to arrange the Dog logo, headings, and link bar.
• Enter a Product Demonstration heading that says: "October 31st at 6 p.m. Dave Sullivan will give a frightfully good demonstration of using a digital camcorder on Halloween."
• In the Contact Information section, enter "You can contact me at ..." and complete this sentence with your College of Business e-mail address. Your email address should become a hyperlink that uses a "mailto" protocol, similar to "mailto:bozo@bus.oregonstate.edu".

Create the website's Marketing Promotion page (20 points)

Build a Marketing Promotion page to look like the image shown below.

• Adjust the form so it sends an email message to your College of Business email box when the Submit Entry to Prize Drawing button is clicked.
• Make sure that the buttons and fields in your form have reasonable properties; that is, the resulting email message should describe the user's choices with labels like: PeopleInCompany: LessThan20 rather than MessageType: Complaint.

Create the website's Essay page (24 points)

Essay topic: Give your essay a major heading of: "Halloween Digital Camcorder Sales Special"

Essay requirements:

• Assume you work for Corvallis Hardware and have been asked to write an entertaining sales pitch for a digital camcorder. Search the web and find a digital camcorder with features that you like. Then write a clear description of how the camera could be used to take videos on Halloween. Your target audience should be 20-something parents who will be helping their kids collect trick-or-treat candy on Halloween.
• Begin by finding at least two websites that have reviews of the digital camcorder you select. These sites should not be competitive sales sites -- they should have independent reviews of the cameras. Somewhere in your essay, you should build links to these review pages and briefly summarize what they say.
• If you copy text into your essay from another location, you must acknowledge the source. You can do this either by putting the material "in quotes like this" or by putting it in italic text like this. Immediately after the copied text, you must put a hyperlink leading to the source of the copied text like this. (Source: BA271 website).
• Length: essay should be between 200 and 400 words long (this word count does not include any words that you may have copied from elsewhere.)

Closing thoughts: This part of the exam requires creativity and clear writing.

• Do your best to research the topic and lively suggestions about how the camera might be used on Halloween.
• Writing quality counts ... use topic sentences, active verbs, and proper punctuations. If you are spelling challenged, then you may want to use a spell-checker.
• Arrange everything in an attractive manner. Thus, you should use headings and should consider using bullets, bold text, images, and other formatting to make your essay look good.
• Use humor if you have it.
• Expect me to use subjective wisdom when I grade this part of the exam -- I will want to reward quality work.

PowerPoint (20 points)

You are to create a two-slide PowerPoint presentation.

• Open PowerPoint and create a new presentation. For your presentation's design, choose the "Flow" theme (whose icon on the Design menu looks like this:  .
• Your first PowerPoint slide should have
  • The title "Website for Corvallis Hardware"
  • Another text area that includes your name and title, as in "Your Name", Senior Account Manager, Simpson Advertising"
  • Images of the dog and "Doggone Good Hardware" logos for the firm.
• The second PowerPoint slide should:
  • Begin with the title "The Website's Marketing Promotion"
  • Contain a text area with at least two bullets describing features of the Marketing Promotion page. (That is, you should make up a couple of sales points about this page, such as "Creates on-line contest".) The bullets should be animated so they fly up one-at-a-time from the bottom of the screen.
• Both slides should use a slow "Cut through black" transition (whose icon on the Animations menu looks like this): .
• Arrange all the elements on theses slides so everything looks organized and attractive.
• Save your slides in p:\classwork\ba271\midterm\name123.ppt, where name123 is replaced with your UserID name.

Turn in exam properly

Within 2 hours of when you started the exam, return the exam instruction sheet to me. You do not need to send me an email message about the exam -- it will be graded directly from the files on the network.