Short summary: In this milestone, you will use the materials you gathered in PM1 to write some content for your website. Think of this phase as writing the first draft of a research paper.
A website needs content. This content can take many forms: text, tables, images, videos, visualiations, infographics, links to other websites, etc. However, this content also needs to be organized in a meaningful way to tell a story. The story of your research. In this milestone you will aim to do that: create an organized structure for the "story" you'll be telling, and then write between 50-75% (at least 50%) of the content that goes within that structure.
In this milestone, your output will include the following components:
As in PM1, these files and folder will go in the folder cs115-project in your CS server account, under a subfolder titled pm2. Make sure that you visit this subfolder on the browser to check that files were uploaded correctly. Remember to use VPN to be able to do so, if you are off-campus.
Using the research questions you formulated in PM1 and making use of all the resources you collected (and others that you might have found since then), generate an outline for your content: titles, subtitles, bullet points. Where necessary, add images (if they are easy to find ). Keep links of every image or other material that you will use and use comments to document them).
Once you have created an outline, start writing text for some of the parts of your research, for example, the introduction or maybe a historical perspective section. The goal is to get as much writing done as possible during the week.
It's probably best to do all this writing on a Google doc to check for spelling mistakes. Only when you are done (hopefully with about 50% of your content), you can start moving your content into the HTML file.
If you have yet to take a Writing class at Wellesley, or if you haven't taken sufficient classes in which you have done writing, I strongly encourage that you make an appointment with the amazing writing tutors of the College. They are there to help you every step of the way.
You will be creating a new HTML file, pm2_research.html, which will contain your content. For this milestone, you can again use only minimum styling for the page as in PM1. In fact, you can use the same pmstyle.css file, which you can update to contain new CSS rules for new elements that you might not have used in PM1. If you will be updating the CSS file, add the new rules at the end of the file and write comments to make clear that you added them for PM2.
If you have gathered any images, keep them in a new, images folder. Make sure that they are around 100 KB as you learned for the Week 1 tasks.
Below are a few examples from Term 3, 2021, so that you get a sense of what is expected in this milestone.
This milestone counts for 6 points (out of 40 for the whole project).
Here is what we will consider in our grading:
I will try my best to give you feedback before the next project milestone is due.
What comes next? In PM3, you will work for creating (or adopting) a CSS stylesheet for your final project. You will then apply that stylesheet to your latest version of your website. We will keep each milestone frozen in time and intact. That means, you will not change pm2_research.html in PM3. Instead, you'll make a copy of it, titled pm3_layout.html and add the new stylesheet to that new file. Similarly, do not make changes to the existing pm1_proposal.html file.