Planning

Website design and development for students/faculty of Mercer University.

Project Information

• The purpose of the website is to inform and promote the courses available at Mercer University.
• The goal is to share and exchange information regarding each specific course.
• The audience of the website would include Mercer University students and faculty.

Project Description

My project is a website for student/faculty of Mercer University. The website will give opportunity to students and faculty to participate in a discussion related to the each individual course offered by Mercer University. In addition, website would extend discussions to topics like: athletics, careers, events on campuses etc. The user will be able to create threads regarding each class and post messages to those threads. In addition students will be able to see syllabuses for each course. The faculty will have an option to post small lecture videos related or about the course. The video could be instructional about specific topic related to the specific course or informative for potential students. Also, life streaming of the class lectures will be available for students with access code provided by instructor. The portal will allow students to sell textbooks to current mercer university students. On the website students could participate in chat discussions with users that are currently online. In order to access the services offered by the website user would have to register account. Based on the provided credentials students and faculty would have access to the parts of the website that are available according to their privileges.

Advantages:

• Students will gain real experience knowledge about the course from current/former students before their register for the class
• Students could ask questions about the course or topic related to the course
• Faculty could provide more information about the course in order to drag attention toward the class
• Students will be more informative about the events happening at the Mercer University

Implementation:

• The students will access the website through desktop or mobile friendly version which will conform to HTML5, PHP, CSS3 and MySQL standards.
• Outside source code may be employed for some part of the website (chat, live streaming).

Possible Users:

Students
• This group would include students attending Mercer University.
• The age of the group is 18-60
Professors
• This group would include professors currently hired at Mercer University
• The age of the group is 30-65

Primary issues:

• The computer knowledge of the user may vary from beginner to professional
• Users may not be aware of what they need to accomplish on the website
• Functionality of the website may be hard to understand for older users

User tasks:

• Register account
• Access each course forum page
• Create topic for specific course
• Write posts for the specified topic
• Create own forum page
• Sell/Buy textbooks
• Access instructor live stream session(Student)
• Create live stream session (Professor)
• Participate in chat session
• Access syllabus for each course
• Provide information/news about the course to the main page of the course(Professor)

Limitations:

• In order to access all services provided by mercer forum students/faculty needs to register
• Students would have access to services offered by mercer website according to their user privileges
• Access code will be generated by professor in order to access live streaming
• 3rd party service for live streaming will used, therefore, instruction on how to start live streaming need to be created for Professors

User Information Needs

• User need to provide following information to register
• First and last name
• Student or Professor
• Degree or Department
• Email
• Telephone number

User can contact the administrator through:

• Telephone
• Email
• Contact form provided by website

The Mercer Forum Website would conform to the following requirements:

• The site should be HTML5, CSS3, PHP, and MySQL compliant.
• All pages must download in less than 10 seconds
• All pages should reflect consistency(fonts, colors)

The site must be compatible with following browser and their current versions:

• Internet Explorer
• Google Chrome
• Mozilla Firefox
• Safari

The site should be compatible with following devices:

• Desktop
• Tablet
• Smartphone

The Mercer Forum would implement 3rd party services:

• Live video streaming - USTREAM
• Chat session - TBA

Website would be hosted by Mercer University

The important dates:

• April 5th complete the website and prepare it for usability study
• May 4th submit final wesbite