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BA271 Green Practice Midterm Exam

You can arrive to begin the midterm exam anytime between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.  Thus, because the exam is two hours long, I will be in the basement computer lab until 6:00 p.m. You will have 2 hours to complete the exam from the time you check in. If you do not have two hours to work on the exam during the exam day, contact me about finding an alternative time. If it will fit your schedule, please start the exam as early as possible to allow time for unexpected problems.

The actual midterm will say: "Do not print this exam—you are to work from the instructions on the computer screen." I will want you to work from the computer screen because that is how most software comes today -- on a CD without a printed manual.

Specific Exam Instructions

Overview

During this exam, assume that you work for Samba Communications, a marketing firm that prepares promotional materials and websites for clients in the Corvallis area. You have been approached by a potential client, Corvallis Handheld Supply, about building a website for their business. You are going to:

• Use Nvu to build a three-page website prototype.
• Use PowerPoint to build a two-slide presentation.

During the exam, as usual, if the instructions appear unclear, feel free to ask for clarification.  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

Open Nvu and construct a three-page website for Corvallis Handheld Supply, a company that sells handheld computing equipment. Build this website on drive P as p:\classwork\ba271\practice. Adjust the website's structure, page headings, page titles, and file names to match the images shown below. Thus,

• The three file names should be index.html, pick-of-the-week.html, and order-form.html, 
• The three page headings should be Corvallis Handheld Supply -- Home Page, Corvallis Handheld Supply -- Pick of the Week, and Corvallis Handheld Supply -- Order Form.
• The three page titles should be Corvallis Handheld Supply Home Page, Corvallis Handheld Supply Pick of the Week, and Corvallis Handheld Supply Order Form.

Create a Word Art slogan

Use Word Art (which is built into the Microsoft Office suite of tools) to create a slogan to be used at the top of each page in your website. The slogan should say, "Travel hand in hand with us to the future." Then use PaintShopPro or some other graphics program to set the background color to be transparent. Do your best to make the slogan look like this GIf with a transparent background., but don't actually copy the graphics file below (that is, build your own copy with Word Art and PaintShopPro).

Store this slogan in a GIF file as p:\classwork\ba271\practice\images\heading.gif.

Create the website's Home Page

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

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

• Enter "Corvallis Handheld Supply -- Home Page" as the page heading and as the page title.
• Insert the slogan image file, create a link bar, and insert a horizontal line.
• Enter a mission statement that says: " We offer the broadest selection of handheld computers in the Willamette Valley."
• 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" where you replace "bozo" with your UserID.

Create the website's Order Form

Adjust the Order Form page to look like the image shown below. Make sure all three option buttons belong to the same group. That is, if the Compaq iPAQ button is pushed down, the other two option buttons should automatically pop up. Adjust the form so it sends your College of Business email box a message when the Submit Order button is clicked.

Write an original essay to fill out the "Pick of the Week" Page with information about the Compaq iPAQ. This essay should be at least 200 words in length.

Comment as of February 6, 2007:  Last term I asked people to write "an original essay about a wiki engine appropriate for use in a mid-sized company; that is, a company with 20 to 100 employees." This term the topic will once again deal with some aspect of using a wiki. Thus, before the exam, I recommend reading through the ideas and following the suggested exercises in this site's What is a Wiki page.

Begin by searching the web to find information about the Compaq iPAQ, a handheld computer. Then edit the body of the Handhelds page to include the following items:

• An opening paragraph that explains why Corvallis Handhelds recommends the Compaq iPAQ.
• A picture of an iPAQ
• A hyperlink leading to where the reader can find more information about the iPAQ.

Caution: this part of the exam is the only part that calls for good writing and creativity. Do your best to write well and include interesting information in an attractive manner. Expect us to use subjective wisdom when we grade this part of the exam so we can reward quality work.

• 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)

PowerPoint

You are to create a two-slide PowerPoint presentation.

• Open PowerPoint and create a new presentation. For your presentation's design, choose the Kimono.Pot design template.
• Your first PowerPoint slide should have the following:
  • The title "Website for Corvallis Handheld Supply"
  • Another text area that includes your name and title, similar to "Dave Sullivan, Senior Account Manager, Samba Communications"
  • An image of a Compaq iPAQ
• The second PowerPoint slide should:
  • Begin with the title "Your Website's Order Form"
  • Contain a text area with two bullets describing features of the Order Form. Give the bullets a custom animation so they have an entrance effect and fly in from the bottom of the screen one-bullet-at-a-time each time the mouse is clicked.
• Both slides should use a slow Blinds Horizontal transition.
• After you have put the required elements on your slides, arrange everything so the slides look good.
• Save your slides in p:\classwork\ba271\practice\name123.ppt, where name123 is replaced with your UserID name.

Turn in exam properly (Note: a section like this will be on the actual midterm)

Within 2 hours of when you started the exam, return the exam scoring sheet to me.

This website was created and is maintained by Dave Sullivan.
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