Clients
Who can be a client? A wide range of people and organizations can be clients. For example:
- A student dorm, organization, club, or team
- A charitable organization, church group, or civic association.
- A small business, either locally in Wellesley, in the hometown of one of the students, or even elsewhere.
- An individual with a hobby, business or some other interest.
How to Become a Client
If you know of a CS110 team, or are approached by one, you can certainly talk to them and come to an agreement to be their client. If not, you can email the CS110 instructors a description of your project and they will forward that to the students. Depending on how many potential clients post projects, your site might not get chosen, in which case you're welcome to try again in a subsequent semester.
Contact Person
In the case where the client is an organization, it's best to appoint a particular contact person who will communicate with the CS110 team, speaking for the organization and making design decisions. It slows things down a lot if the contact person always has to meet with others to make decisions, and the semester flies by pretty quickly.
Scope of the Website
CS110 teams build websites of about 8-10 web pages. There is a little flexibility here, depending on the zeal of the team, but a client should not expect a website that is significantly more than that. A site that is significantly less than that is also inappropriate.
The website content will consist of text, images (pictures) and graphical decorations. There may also be movies or sound files. For the most part, that content must be supplied by the client. For example, an organization's mission statement, constitution or history is text that the team cannot supply. In some cases, the CS110 team can take digital camera pictures, of, say, a dorm, but the team's responsibility is not to become the client's historian.
The contact person for the client should understand that
deadlines in CS110 are firm. If the content isn't supplied
by the deadline, the team will just put in stuff goes
here
or other sorts of fillers, which is unsatisfying
for everyone. Please get the content to the team in a
timely fashion.
A CS110 website can have blog
or guestbook
features, and it can have a form that a
visitor can fill out where the data gets emailed to the
client. This can be nice for, say, questionnaires and
such. However, a CS110 website does not support
databases, e-commerce applications, and other kinds of
advanced technologies.
The CS110 team deserves a chance to be genuinely
creative in their design of the site. Therefore, it's not
appropriate to ask a team to update
an existing
site, just tweaking a few things here or there. Even if
there is an existing site (which often happens), the
replacement site is expected to be genuinely new: a
complete re-design.
Hosting
The website will be hosted on the CS department server
(cs.wellesley.edu
) while the CS110 team is
developing it. That is temporary space just for that
semester and perhaps a few weeks afterwards. A finished
site cannot be hosted on our department server, however.
The client will have to find a web hosting service to
copy the site to at the end of the semester. For
on-campus clients, they should check with Wellesley's
Library and Technology Services (LTS). For off-campus
clients, they will need to find a
commercial web
hosting service. Their Internet service provider
(ISP) may offer web hosting as part of their package.
Or, your client can find some third-party web hosting
company. A web search
for web
hosting service will turn up companies and ratings
and reviews.
Delivery
The website is finished and tested by the end of
classes. At that point, the CS110 team should be able to
deliver the website to the client, possibly just by
copying the files. It's also possible to burn
the files onto a CD or some other storage medium. The CS110
team or the client can contact
cs-sysadmin@wellesley.edu
if they need help with this.
Usually, the CS110 team members are very busy with final exams and other projects in the weeks after the site is done. The client may have to wait for a week or two, or copy the site themselves.
Often, it's easier and more secure for the client to simply copy the files to their web host, since they would have the necessary passwords, etc.
Ongoing Maintenance
Every website needs occasional maintenance: updating information as it changes, replacing old pictures and other content, and the like. Of course, some sites change more quickly than others; only the client can estimate how much maintenance is likely. Clients should know that maintenance is their responsibility. The student teams can't be responsible for the site once the semester is over.
Of course, in some cases, one of the students is involved with the client's organization, such as being a member of a student club, and will take on the job of maintaining the website. That's perfectly appropriate, but is a separate agreement from the responsibilities of CS110 students.
Guarantee
There is no guarantee of any kind. In most cases,
our student teams do terrific work, and we are proud
of them. Most clients are very happy with the
results, but occasionally one is not. You should not
rely on a CS110 team for anything that
is mission-critical
to you or your
organization.
The faculty of CS110 and the student teams appreciate the opportunity to do something that is of real value to a client. However, our primary priority must be to the educational mission of the course.
More Information
The preceding information is given to clarify expectations so that no one is confused. The CS110 teams are encouraged to contact their advisor if there is any question.