CS486: Senior Capstone Design
Project Web Site Guidelines

Each team must build and maintain a project website. The objective of this site is twofold: first as a primary communication vehicle with your sponsor and, second, to provide information about your project and your senior design experience to other students/faculty within the CET, and to people outside the CET and within the sponsor organization who are interested in what we are doing. It is imperative, therefore, that this site be professional, be well designed, and be frequently updated and maintained to the current level of the project. Please check with your sponsor on any content and sensitivity issues, e.g., is it okay to post their name/address.

After creating the site you should plan to have a review with your sponsor for overall approval and incorporate any changes you believe will improve the site and its intended purpose. We are expecting a professional looking site but are not expecting award winning design and use of complex controls.

For the initial site, basic project content (described below) and navigation within that content are the requirements. Fill in as much as you know at this time; additional items will be added as the project progressesr. For items you cannot complete yet, note them with "to be completed" OR "in progress", etc.

Overall usability -- well-formatted content, effective presentation of the material, and ease of navigation --- is a key goal!

Project Website CONTENT

Your project WWW site should include the following. Note that I'm not in any way indicating how you should organize the following info (i.e. menu structures/labels or what goes where). This is simply some info that should appear on your page:

Project Intro:

  1. Project name and graphics (if available)
  2. Team information: team members, project roles, picture of the team. This would be a great place to link in the Team Member Profiles you developed to satisfy the Team Inventory Guidelines.
  3. Project sponsor information: name, address, etc (with your sponsor's approval )
  4. A link to your sponsor's home page, if applicable
  5. Technical advisor information (if applicable)

Project Details:

  1. Project description - what is the overall problem, what is the general solution that we are creating? This should NOT be drawn from the sponsor's project proposal! Write up one page (possibly with graphics) explanation, in plain english, of the overall motivation for the project (what's the problem that needs improving?), the way in which you see it solving the problem, how you've tackled it, and maybe a few words on outcome or time/money it will save the sponsor. Should give us a solid idea of what you're doing, and make us feel that it's needed.
  2. High level requirements: Give a quick overview of the major requirements or goals of your implementation effort. An intro paragraph and some major bullets.
  3. High level design philosophy and concept: what is your architecture and design concept and what are your best ideas on the architecture details and any of the views you have created. Can be a combination of text and graphics. Then talk briefly about the design paradigm (i.e. waterfall, spiral, etc.) you decided to use and why. In general, your goal is to give an overview discussion of how you tackled the problem and convince us that this was a reasonable way to go about it.
  4. Tools/languages used in design and development and other resource specifics. Give the geeks in the audience insight into the technical approach to the problem and the tools you're using.
  5. Schedule, resources, budget (if applicable) - as much as you know, where you are in the schedule. Subsections could include project status reports..

Other possible info of interest:

  1. Archive of all delivered documents, e.g., requirements, design docs, team meeting minutes, etc. But be judicious: don't just dump anything and everything here!....focus on things you feel would give more info or insight into your project process.
  2. A link to competitive and other related sites, if applicable
  3. Any other graphics and/or content regarding your project you believe might be of interest to others.

QUALITY STANDARDS

TECHNICAL DETAILS

Initially, team website can be put up on any convenient server. Ultimately, however, team websites must be maintained in a special CENS server/location dedicated to Capstone projects so that project websites will be archived and accessible long after you are gone. The web manager for each team will work with engineering IT staff to create and gain access to a team directory on the CENS web server. I recommend you do this right off the bat! Then you won't have to move your website later!

Technical constraints: