IDCC 380 Blog Spring 2008

Monday, May 5, 2008

Sources & Credits

Since I decided to make this site since I was one of the principle organizers of Spring Day this year, I don't have very many sources and credits. Everything found on this page was either written by me or images that CAB had permission to use for advertising and promotional needs. As the Vice President of CAB, I was able to use these images for this site as well, since the site was sent out to the entire campus to answer all their Spring Day questions.


The Spring Day logo on the home page was designed by Jason Feldman for CAB to use on anything Spring Day related; it came from the posters and towels he designed for us. The images used on the Concert page were gained from the agents of the artists. These were the images submitted to CAB to be used for any and all advertising and promotional uses we had for this event.

I owe a big thanks to my friends Joey Carregal, Alexa Hassaram, Frank Ricci and Katelyn Thompson for not only taking pictures during the day for me, but also for allowing me to put them on the Web site since I was too busy during the day to take pictures of my own.

And finally, Bentley administration, specifically Nina DeAregla and Andrew Shepardson, were instrumental in building the Spring Day policies page as they are the ones who make the college's policies for the day.

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Future Plans

My future plans for this site are rather simple. After completing it, I have every intention on sending the files to the new Webmaster for CAB. Since I spent a lot of time building this site and making sure everything I could imagine was included on it, I don't think that the new Webmaster for CAB would have to do much work to update this site from year to year.

The two biggest tasks to continue using this site are rather self-explanatory. The first is that the information needs to be updated again every year. Not only does the date need to change, but so does the other information. The schedule and concert change every year, but with the page already built, it shouldn't be too hard to update it from year-to-year. The policies won't need much changing as they stay pretty constant. Obviously the pictures will need to be updated after each Spring Day. The other page that would need some maintenance would be the competition page and the second-tier pages from there. The only real changes necessary would be to update the brackets and times/dates of the games.

Another task that would need to be done would be to update the look of the page. Just as I
made sure that the colors of this page went along with the color palette used for the advertising this year, the Webmaster for CAB would need to do the same. If the same color are used again, then there wouldn't need to be much updating in the CSS file. One thing that I would definitely recommend to the Webmaster would be to work with the person designing the advertising so it would be easier to make a banner for the page instead of using a simple color as the background.

In addition to these two tasks, I would make one more big change next year. That would be to have sign-ups online next year. CAB does sign-ups for its tournaments during the year on its Web site and I think that would be a good idea for next year. By doing this, they could keep track of how many teams were signed up and would eliminate the need for students to take their sign up sheets to the Info Desk and have to turn them in by hand.

Usability Test

Task 1

Use the Web site to find out who is performing at the Spring Day concert.

Goals
  • Is the site easy to navigate?
  • Do the titles of the top-tier pages make sense to the users?
Follow-up Questions
  • Tell me what you thought about while you performed this task.
  • Did the information given to you meet your expectations?
  • On a scale of 1-5 (1 being most difficult), how difficult was it for you to find the information?

Task 2

Use the Web site to get to the Bentley CAB home page.

Goals
  • Is the site easy to navigate?
  • Does having navigation on the bottom of the page effect the usability of the page?
Follow-up Questions
  • Tell me what you thought about while you performed this task.
  • Did the information given to you meet your expectations?
  • On a scale of 1-5 (1 being most difficult), how difficult was it for you to find the CAB home page?

Task 3

Use the Web site to find out who came in second place in the 3-0n-3 basketball tournament.

Goals
  • Is the site easy to navigate?
  • Does the lack of second-tier navigation from the home page hinder the usability of the site?
  • Are there any usability issues opening the bracket as an Excel spreadsheet?
Follow-up Questions
  • Tell me what you thought about while you performed this task.
  • Did the information given to you meet your expectations?
    • Probe: What did you think when you needed to open an Excel spreadsheet?
  • On a scale of 1-5 (1 being most difficult), how difficult was it for you to find the information?

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Content, Look & Feel

Content

The information in my Dream Site is very simple and straight-forward. From the home page you can find pretty much anything you are looking for. The pages are labeled very simply, so it is very easy to tell what each page entails.

The Spring Day Policies page has all of the rules and policies that the college enforces and puts into effect on Spring Day. Some of these policies differ from the normal day-to-day policies on campus, so it seemed very important to include this in the Web page. This page also includes the guest contract that all students need to fill out if they are registering a guest on campus for the day.

The Competition Rules page is both an informational and gateway page. On this page itself, you can get the general rules that apply to each of the competitions held on Spring Day. You can also get to individualized pages for 3-on-3 Basketball, Float-A-Boat, Harry's Hill Climb, 9v9 Kickball and Volleyball. Each of these pages has individualized rules for each competition and the basketball, kickball and volleyball pages also include the brackets for the tournaments.

The Concert Page was used for CAB to announce the acts for the Spring Day concert and the Spring Day Schedule has the entire itinerary for the day so people could find out when and where everything is happening. The Pictures Page was "under construction" until after the day happened when I made a flash slide show and posted pictures that my friends took from the day.

Look & Feel

The look & feel of this page came from validated CSS and W3C XHTML. The colors of the page were picked from the posters that CAB already ordered. Since CAB tries to pick a theme and stick with it when advertising for an event, I decided to keep these colors for the Web page. In looking at other Web sites, it was hard to find a site designated to a specific event. I know that CAB's Web page only offers a brief one to two sentence description of each event and I needed to do better than that. Even when I was looking at sites that were for an event, I was not able to find any that went into as much depth as I wanted to go into so it was hard to find a site I wanted to resemble mine after. Even though it was frustrating when looking for a site, it did work out a bit to my advantage. Instead of making the page fancy with lots of flash and clutter, I wanted to keep the site simple so it was easy to navigate and find whatever information on was looking for.

When it came to creating the navigation bars, I decided to go with a side navigation bar that I built with CSS Tab Designer 2. I debated using Visual Infinite Menus, but since I hope this site will get used in the future, I decided that was not feasible since that software can only be used for this class. In addition, with the exception of the separate competitions, there was no other second-tier pages.

As mentioned above, I did not pick my color palette, I used the one that was picked by the Spring Day Committee and Jason Feldman, who designed all of the posters, towels and backstage passes for the day. Due to having everything else already designed, I decided not to make a banner for the page. I thought about doing one, but I was not able to use any of the images that had already been designed, so I decided to use a simple header for this year's site.

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Purpose, Scope & Audience

Purpose and Scope

The purpose of the site is to put all information regarding Spring Day in one place. The site features a schedule of the day's events, announces the concert and has all the rules and regulations for the day on the site.

In addition to using this site before Spring Day to answer questions people may have about the event, it is also a great resource after the event. In addition to posting pictures after the event occurred, I also posted the winners of all the races and tournaments in addition to the completed brackets so people could see how their friends did if they missed the tournament.

Audience

This site is for the students of Bentley College. Spring Day is an event open to both undergrad and graduate students at the school and their guests. Since those are the people who will be attending the event, this site was made with them in mind.

After publishing the site, I realized that Bentley administrators would also be using this site to get information about what is actually occurring on the day of the event. The administrators that were in charge of scheduling staff for the event used the site to figure out what was going on and ensure that they had enough staff on hand at any given time. Also, the marketing director for Bentley also used the site to ensure the professional photographer that was hired would know where and when everything was going on.

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Friday, April 25, 2008

Dream Site Discussion

This blog not only serves as my blog for the exercise that we did in class to learn how we could change the template and use Blogger, it will also hold entries with discussions about the purpose, scope, audience, content, look and feel, usability tests, future plans and sources/credits for my Dream Site. My Dream Site for this project is a Spring Day Web site with all pertinent information to the day.

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Thursday, April 10, 2008

First Post: A Test 04/10


This is a test to see how this blog will work on my website being created for Spring Day, which is also my final project for IDCC 380. Hopefully the Web site is not too hard to maintain and the day goes great.

Spring Day is on Saturday, April 26th on lower campus at Bentley College and open only to Bentley students and their guests.
  • Harry's Hill Climb is at 11AM
  • The main events begin at 12Noon
  • Basketball, Kickball and Volleyball begin at 12:30PM (with prelims on Thurs & Fri night)
  • Float-a-Boat is at 2PM
  • The concert is at 5PM, doors open at 4:30PM
This is a test. This is a test. This is a test. This is a test. This is a test. This is a test. This is a test. This is a test. This is a test. This is a test. This is a test. This is a test. This is a test. This is a test. This is a test. This is a test. This is a test. This is a test. This is a test. This is a test. This is a test.

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