CS110 Projects
Each semester in CS110, students form teams of two students to implement a website for an external client. This document is written for potential clients, so that they can understand whether their project is appropriate for a CS110 team.
Clients
Who can be a client? A wide range of people and organizations can be clients. For example:
- A student 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.
- A college office, department, dorm or other group.
- 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 post (using FirstClass) a description of your project to CS110-Q&A. Teams will look there to find clients. Depending on how many potential clients post to CS110-Q&A, your site might not get chosen, in which case you're welcome to try again some other semester.
If you're off-campus, you can contact one of the instructors, describing your project, and one of them can post your project description on your behalf.
Contact Person
In the case where the client is an organization, it's usually 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, but that's disatisfying for everyone. Please get the content to the team in a timely fashion.
A CS110 web site 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 web site does not have databases and other kinds of 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.
To see some of the best work of CS110 students, please see our hall of fame.
Hosting
The web site will be hosted on the CS department server (puma.wellesley.edu) while the CS110 team is developing it. That is temporary space just for that semester and maybe a few weeks afterwards. A finished site cannot be hosted on Puma. The client will have to find a web hosting service of some sort (there are many commercial sites) to copy the site to at the end of the semester. Here are some suggestions for web site hosting.
Delivery
The web site is finished and tested by the end of classes. At that point, the CS110 team should be able to deliver the web site to the client, possibly just by copying the files from Puma. It's also possible to burn the files onto a CD or some other mechanism. The CS110 team or the client can contact cs-sysadmin@wellesley.edu if they need help with this.
Usually, the CS110, being students, are very busy with final exams and stuff in other classes 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 and such.
More Information
The preceding information is given just to clarify expectations so that no one is confused. The CS110 teams are encouraged to contact their advisor if there is any question.
© Computer Science 110 Staff
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
Date Modified:
Monday, 28-Jan-2008 13:55:12 EST
