Final Project Proposal

Final Project Proposal

Audience:

This site is written specifically for my online and on-campus students who are taking my writing classes.
If it's on the web, it will be available for anyone to access.

Goals:

Primary goals:
- to make an appealing help site that my students will actually use.
- to make the information on the site accurate and relevant
- to provide examples and practice pages so the site is somewhat interactive rather than just informational
Secondary goal:
- to offer links to other help pages on the web for additional information - there's already really good stuff out there!
On second thought: Goals after completing this proposal:
- My thoughts for this site have changed as I looked at the sibling sites and realized that I was wasting my time creating an all-inclusive online Help Center for students when there are many excellent sites already available for them.
- Rather than making an all-inclusive site, my goal is to create a Writing Help site that explains my position on writing topics but also equally acts as a clearing house of the information on the web. See sample page: Plagiarism (top)

Audience Use:

Use will differ with every student, depending on his/her individual needs.
All students enrolled in the online class will find all of the ancillary class materials at this site, so they will visit it quite frequently.
Students enrolled in all three courses can access the site (top)

Description of Planned Site:

Theme
- Reference (with self-testing options on some of the pages)
Site Elements
- Menu Home Page
  - Few graphics
  - Flash buttons for pizzazz, but for those who can't use them, a link to text-only menu
  - Five main Help! search categories: writing process, style, punctuation, sentence, organization
- Subsequent Help! pages
  - Few graphics - only to relieve boredom - cartoons?
  - Comments about value of this category
  - Links to individual Help! pages
  - Links to additional, outside Help! pages
- Individual Help! pages
  - Few graphics - again, only to relieve boredom
  - Comments about value of this page
  - Instruction
  - Examples
  - Link to practice quiz page
- Practice pages
  - Few graphics
  - Practice Quizzes
  - Answers to Quizzes
  - Links to additional, more specific information
- Site map
Name, copyright, date, on each page
Site Structure
- Hierarchical (top)

Sibling Sites

www.dartmouth.edu/~compose/student/ac_paper/revise.html
- Great site! Very professional site. Perhaps too much text on a page. Lots of ideas about what to include on my site. No fancy links - very functional.
www.utexas.edu/world/lecture
- grey, black and white is very boring - want to look professional but not boring
http://order.ph.utexas.edu/chaos
- very interesting online course - this time the whiteness of the page did not bother me. Only one or two sentences per page and small graphics - wouldn't think it would be effective but it was - not chaotic at all, which is a point that's made early in the course - very uncluttered - few graphics - no fancy links
www.onlinesapiens.com/courses.html
- Ugh! Ugly site - only a list - not at all hospitable
http://telr.ohio-state.edu/courses/success.html
- Used powerpoint slides - took too long to load - complete sentences make for better explanations
http://www.fathom.com/course/1275#assignments
- Everything was on one page with anchors to interesting places on the page, but why didn't they use more than one page? - Text ideas (checked them out and decided to pass) (top)

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