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Langara Outlines

PUBL 1235 Outline (2020)

Course: Publ 1235Title: Web Production 1
Credits: 6Room: A247 (Mac Lab)
Term: Summer 2020Class Days/Times:
June 18–Aug 15
Tuesday 500–720
Wednesday 130–520
Thursday 200–520
Office Hours:
Monday 2-4

This Section B class is devoted to the production of the online Pacific Rim Magazine.

Like anything in life, this outline is subject to occasional changes. Throughout the term, I will add links to additional supporting content.

Production of LangaraPRM.com will extend into the exam period, possibly right to the last day of the exam period.

For that reason, do not assume that the term ends with the last lecture.

Your PRM group may be required as late as August 15. If so, you will be expected to be available.

Failure to be available will affect your grade.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the class, the student should be able to:

  • understand typical roles of people involved in the production of a website
  • analyze the usability and design of websites
  • work well with the other teams involved in the production process
  • understand the purpose and value of content management systems
  • critique designs for usability, accessibility, scalability
  • respond professionally to feedback
  • assess proposed design solutions in terms of their ease of design, production, & maintenance.

LangaraPRM Awards

The department is proud of the awards that the print and web editions have picked up over the years. Some are listed on the LangaraPRM site.

If you go to the website listing the College Media Association’s Pinnacle Award winners, you’ll see that our little operation here is in some pretty good company:

Textbook & Other Costs

There is nothing to buy for this course. 

Course Structure

The class schedule is detailed below.

I will give occasional lectures or demonstrations, but the major part of the class time will be spent producing the website.

As the bulk of your work will be done in groups, and because other groups depend upon your group’s work, it is your utmost responsibility to make sure that you do not miss any deadlines. For that reason, there will be a mark for meeting deadlines.

Groups

You will work in a group of your own devising for the first assignment, a presentation on Thursday, June 27th (details later in this page).

For the rest of the semester, you will work as part of a production group. Group descriptions are described at the following link.

Pacific Rim Magazine Departments

Assignment Marks

Assignment One: Site Analysis PresentationJune 2520%
Assignment Two: Departmental TasksOngoing40%
Meeting Deadlines 20%
Professionalism 20%

As you have no doubt guessed by now, the majority of assignments in this class will be group work. This is just the nature of the beast in the world of work.

More detailed information on group tasks will be made available via consultation with instructor.

Week One: June 27: Site Analysis Presentations

You will be part of a group for this assignment. This group is not a department. It is just a group to accomplish the task of formulating a vision of the magazine.

Please consider both last year’s LangaraPRM and the previous ones.

Previous editions of PRM are archived at the following URLs. They are password protected: the credentials are on the 1235 Brightspace home page.

In presenting your vision of what we should do with the site this year, ask yourself questions like those below.

Don’t feel that you have to answer all of these questions, point by point: that makes a boring presentation (especially when there’s three or four of them one after another).

Instead, present a vision of where the LangaraPRM works (over the years), where it could improve, and where we could take this year’s version.

  • Who are our users? What do they need from the site?
  • How does the Publishing department use the online PRM?
  • How does the College use the online PRM?
  • How do alumni, recent and not recent, use the online PRM?
  • What do other magazine-type sites do? What do they do well? What can we do better? Please present example sites and discuss what features they have that are worthy of emulation.
  • Do these other sites have really effective mobile strategies? Present and discuss.
  • What did previous year sites do well? What could they have done better?
  • Are any features missing from earlier editions?
  • What features of the magazine do we want to stress?
  • How does LangaraPRM.com fit into your portfolio? What would make you really proud of having been involved in it?
  • In what ways could we create content that adds to that presented in the print version?
  • What could we add to the site that we don’t have now?
  • Could the navigation be improved?

In thinking of what we want to do, ask yourself the following additional questions:

  • What lies within our skill sets?
  • If something is outside our current skill set, can a team member or two try to learn how to achieve it?
  • We realistically have about a month to design, code, and test the site. Each of these tasks is done by a different group. What can we collectively get done in that time?
  • How much wheel reinvention can we avoid?

Getting more specific:

  • What types of content do we have?
  • What major sections does the site need to have?
  • How should the site be organized?
  • How should features be treated?
  • What meta information should be included with each article?
  • What additional unique-content pages do we need?
  • What logo/banner treatment(s) can we envision?
  • Are there features from other sites we should adopt?
  • What is missing from the current or previous versions of the site?
  • Do older versions of the site have features worth bringing back?

Think of more questions we need to ask. Remember, this is your project and nothing is necessarily sacred.

All of these questions have obvious answers, and not so obvious ones. Find an unique way of describing our task, our challenges, and possible paths to solutions.

The results of your competitive analysis are to delivered as a group presentation Thursday June 25. The presentation should take approximately 15 – 30 minutes.

Your slides, URL examples, written analysis, etc will be handed in and shared, to work as a group resource to be consulted throughout the production process.

This assignment isn’t meant for you to produce a mockup. It’s to produce ideas and inspirations for the entire production process.

NOTE Some of the following scheduling will change in response to team makeup and schedules of others.

Week Three June 30 – July 02: First Group Tasks

  • Tuesday: Production Schedules Discussed and Fleshed Out By Departments
  • Editors analyze previous years content, formulate house tagging (HTML & WP) guide
  • Editors begin story entry, categorizing, tagging, author assignment
  • Web Designers meet to discuss content needs, problems, possible solutions
  • Web Designers begin work on wireframes & then mockups
  • Promotion formulates plans for blog, social media—including schedule of updates.
  • Promotion works on blog profiles of all the different teams
  • WP Designers start accelerated PUBL 1232 schedule

Week Three: July 07–09: 

  • Wednesday: Web Designers present mockups of index, story and archive pages
  • Wednesday: class critique of design work
  • Thursday: Web Designers respond with improved mockups
  • Thursday: Web Designers present list of required image sizes.
  • Editors begin summaries
  • WP Designers research the WordPress Template Hierarchy
  • WP Designers research the Loop, basic Template Tags
  • WP Designers start working with “real” content from the live site.
  • QA researches web-based bug tracking solutions
  • QA begins inventory of current & potential site bugs

Week Four: July 14-16

  • Tuesday: Web Design Team hands off all or most of their comps to WP Design Team
  • Work begins on first “official” WP Template pages
  • QA: Decides on software for bug tracking.

Week Five: July 21-23: 

  • WP Design Team: More Template Drafts & Testing
  • Media: Images Uploaded, Galleries Created, Etc

Week Six: July 28–July 30:  Testing & Fixing

  • WP Designers: site goes live?
  • QA: more testing
  • Print Style Sheet created. Team to be determined.
  • Everyone: Even more testing
  • WP Designers: Fixing
  • Web Designers: Fixing
  • Everyone: More fixing
  • Q/A / WP Designers / Web Designers / Editors: Final Sign Off

Week Seven: Aug 04-15 (Exam Period)

  • Cleanup and completion of “overrun” tasks
  • Post-Mortem, date TBA: on this day, you will hand in your assessment of your production group members’ contribution to your group production effort. More details forthcoming.