ITD-110-001
Project #2 – Create web pages for the Widgets-R-Us Company.
Due Date: Saturday, November 6, 2004 9 AM
Requirements
A frame must be used to navigate to various pages in your site. A main page should come up by default welcoming people to your Widgets-R-Us Company and giving a little background about the company. There should be links that will take you to a products page, a customer service page and a feedback page. Each of these pages must appear in one of the windows you declare in your frames page when you first connect to your web site. They do not all have to appear simultaneously.
The Products page contains a list of widgets the company sells. The following information should be supplied for each item and should be displayed as a row in an HTML table. You can add additional information, such as an illustration, if you like. Illustrations are encouraged because people are more likely to buy items they can see:
 | Item title |
| Stock number |
| Description of item |
| Price |
The Customer Service page contains information about your company policies, if any, for servicing widgets made by your company. You might want to consider what sort of money back guarantee your company will have. Try to be sincere about your desire to have satisfied customers and project an aura of confidence and professionalism about your company.
The Feedback page should contain an HTML form that a customer can use to get more information about your company’s products. The following form fields below are required. Of course you should have some plain text next to the form field so it’s clear what sort of information should go in each field. You can add additional fields if you wish. For design purposes you may find it desirable to put the form information into a table. You must use the exact name of the form fields specified. You should test the form by submitting it to the URL below. To test, enter your own E-mail address in the EMail field. If it works correctly you should get a page back listing your form’s parameters, and an E-mail message should appear shortly in your E-mail in-box. I suggest you copy and paste the URL below into your form action attribute since it is easy to get it incorrect.
http://www.oakhillva.com/php/ITD-110-P2.php
In the feedback page you are trying to get questions from customers about your products. A submit button will be needed to send the information to the web server. A reset button is also a good idea. A simple example of a form that calls the above URL and sends a response to the email address you specified can be found here. (If you are curious what the server side script looks like, click here. It is written in PHP.) Below are the form fields that should be on the feedback page:
| Name of Field (use in NAME attribute) | Form Field Type | Notes | Additional information |
| CustName | TEXT | Maxlength="30" | Customer Name |
| Product | SELECT | Allow multiple entries | Place one item in the select list for each widget or widget accessory you are selling |
| Phone | TEXT | Maxlength="12" | A phone number |
| Contact | RADIO | Should have two values "YES" and "NO" | "Yes" means a representative should call |
| TEXT | Maxlength="50" | Place your E-mail address in here for testing if you want to get a response. | |
| Comments | TEXTAREA | 60 columns, 6 rows | A place for customers to enter comments or questions they might have about the product or service. |
Optional. Some students are perfectionists. If you wish for an extra learning experience you can create two hidden fields in your form. These will be used by the response page to dynamically provide the name of your company and a background image. For the latter field you would have to provide the full URL. For the company name create a hidden field called "company" and for the background create a hidden field called "background". Of course you will have to assign values to these hidden fields. If it works the response page will look a lot more professional. Note: there is no extra credit for doing this!
Testing
In particular check to make sure your site works correctly using both IE 6.x and Mozilla Firefox.
Deliverables
Students are encouraged to be creative within the scope of the requirements. You should try to be persuasive and to design a small site that captures a reader’s interest and hopefully encourages them to purchase widgets from your company. The same criteria applying to project #1 will be used.
You must publish the effort to a web site and provide me with the URL. You can do this by mailing the URL to mhamill@computer.org by 9 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 6th. I will also pass around a sheet on class the day before where you can write down the URL.
Note that for this project you will likely spawn a lot of HTML pages, one for the frames page and one for each page called by your frames page. This would be a minimum of four pages. If you use images you will also need to publish these to your web site.
Other Caveats
| If the URL you provide is not correct or inaccessible from the public internet, you will lose 5 points for every day this problem exists. This is a good simulation for real web page publishing where things have to work reliably and be available when promised. Web surfers are notoriously unforgiving. |
| Students are honor bound not to have anyone else help them with this project. Students are also honor bound not to modify the contents of their site after they have turned it in. Please bear in mind that all files in your web site and date stamped and it is a simple matter to determine if newer files have been uploaded. Students should code all HTML by hand instead of relying on tools, particularly since I’ll be grading based on how well I can read your source code. |
Suggestions
You will probably want to use the same web site for the Final Project too. In this case I recommend that you add two folders to the web site, one for each project. I also recommend you try to make your frame page use either default.htm or index.html. One of these names should work for your web server. Using the NVCC server as an example, you might use the following URL to get to your frame: http://www.student.nvcc.edu/home/mhamill/project2. This would likely load a frames page called default.htm.
I will be looking for volunteers to demonstrate their web site to the class.