Due: Tuesday, May 13
Redesign either SUNY New Paltz’s CAS website or Vassar College’s English Department website and provide a detailed document outlining and justifying the design and development decisions made during the redesign.
You don’t have to recreate all of the site’s pages. If you choose CAS, redesign its home page, vending page, and ID/meal plans page. If you choose English, redesign its home page, ‘standards for the evaluation of written work’ page and correlate sequences page.
Anyone who has chosen the CAS site may be interested in SUNY New Paltz’s Style Guide, which includes hawk logos. (Hat tip: Laura)
The reasoning strategies we practiced in Project 2 will be critical to your success for this project and its documentation. How the site is redesigned to look must reflect your decisions, and your decisions must address shortcomings you perceive about the existing site.
This project, as per our site’s Assignments & Grading section, is worth 45% of your grade: the project itself is worth 30%; the documentation is worth 15%.
Grading
The Project
- 8 points Site is based on our Shell
- 8 points Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict
- 8 points Valid CSS
- 8 points Site uses proper semantic markup
- 8 points Site is available online
- 10 points Design is aesthetically meaningful and, if implemented, would be a practical improvement
- 50 points Total
The Documentation
Writing should be 3-5 pages in length, in essay format. Explain the shortcomings of the existing design, as well as the semantic and aesthetic decisions you’ve made in your redesign to address those shortcomings.
Don’t explain why semantic code is important; explain why the semantics you’ve implemented work for your site. Don’t explain why your design looks nicer that what existed before; explain why your design works well, and how that is a direct result of your planning and tinkering.