Identification of designing a web page for your school

Identification

The Doha College is a coeducational school for students aged between 11 and 18 years. It is situated in the Arabian Gulf in the capital city of the State of Qatar. It provides a British Curriculum to student from over 40 different countries. Although the culture here does not resemble the European and Western culture, the environment of the classes are the same. The Doha College is one of the few schools in Qatar that represents the British system of teaching. The College's foundation was the result of many members of the British Community, including the British Ambassador, who became the first ever Chairman of the Board of Governors. The Qatar Government approved to the project and continues to give its full and appreciated support plus its encouragement. The Doha College was opened in September 1980. It was moved from their old school to the new one, located in the Salwa Road in April 1988.
The college has now become one of the best schools in Doha. Over 650 students from all over the world are currently being taught in the school. Over a hundred students join the school every year. A lot of events take place around the school ,for example, fairs ,sport events and school parties. All of these events are published around school premises to tell the students about these events. These published document are found mainly on notice boards.

The College publicises itself in many way. For example:

College uniform.
Word of mouth (rumours)
Year Books
Sports events
School production
Fairs and fund raisers
Posters sent around schools
College prospectus
Add in logo on newspapers
Communication between parents and school e.g. news letters and parents teacher meeting.



The Task

Much of the printed publicity of the College tends to be rather dull. Although the printed publicity of the College is often very informative, it doesn't really attract anyone to actually sit down and read it. The printed publicity is often printed in a laser printer and is photocopied about 20 times and is given to the class students. This publicity comes out in two colours, black and white which makes the document very unattractive. These publicity are very unoriginal. The letters and information given to the parents from the school can be particularly straight forward but it still contains to much information, normally known as a information over load.

We have decided to concentrate on designing our own new publicity system for the Doha College. This system could include:
Letters home to parents
Poster advertising about the College
News Letters
Option Booklets
School Prospectus
Year Books


These publicity systems have to be :
Colourful
Attractive
Informative but not dull
Eye catching
Original
Modern
Something that the students or anyone won't forget about it.

We have decided to produce a newsletter as my publicity system. We are going to design my own newsletter, mentioning all the events taking place around the school. For example, We could mention any sport events or sport fixtures taking place around the school. We could also mention the school fairs, or any other special activities that are taking place around the premises.
To check if my newsletter is satisfying enough, we could hand them out to different people of different ages. We could take in consideration of all their different opinions and alter any changes needed in my new publicity system. We are going to compare our new publicity system (the newsletter), with the other newsletters, that are found in the college.
We have looked at the newsletters that are sent around by the school, and as you may already know they are particularly boring! So we are going to make our publicity system:-

a) Attractive:- It has got to make parents and students read it, if it is going to be unattractive, no one will even look at it.

b) Interesting:- It has got to be interesting, to allow parents and students to read the publicity system at the same time, enjoy what they are reading.

c) Original:- The newsletter will have to be original, because if it isn't parents and student will not be attracted to it, thinking it is going to be the same type of document again!



Hardware:

We have already identified, what our publicity system will look like. Now we must describe the different types of hardware We are going to use. Mainly we will be using DTP to work on the newsletter.
1. The Mouse:- The mouse is one of the most important tools to work in DTP. The mouse helps us to move around the document easily and allows us to transmit the movement of our hand to the computer.
2. The scanner:- The scanner will be a very important tool to work on in DTP. This is because, maybe we would want to incorporate our own pictures or photographs into our document.
3.The Printer:- The printer, whether it is an ink-jet or a laser printer, could be used to out put the document. Obviously to check, how are new publicity system looks like we are going to use the printer.
4.The Visual Display Unit:-The monitor should be as large as you can afford, because it will avoid eye strain. Also you might have to work with 2 screens at the same time, this is why we need a VDU.
5. The Digital Camera:- The digital camera may be used to take pictures of the school premises or photographs of the people in the school.

We would prefer to use this sort of hardware to work on our publicity system, mainly the digital camera or even the scanner to produce our publicity system. The newsletter has to be attractive, that is why we are mainly going to use the hardware that will provide us with pictures.

During the year we have already done some rough ideas and sketches on how our new publicity system will look like. Experimenting with Microsoft Publisher and Visio to do some rough designs on what our leaflet will look like. I personally believe this is good idea by getting us into the hand of working with DTP.



Web Page

Due to some research we have realised that we are not going to create a newsletter, but a web page.






Identification of Web Page project:

The Internet is quickly becoming the fastest medium of communications with over 60 million users world wide. Recently, Q-tel. introduced its own server for Internet access. While this project is new and the Qtel file server can hold a very limited amount of customers at one time, the service is very cheap (QR6 per hour) and has enjoyed a fair amount of success. The introduction of this technology to Qatar has provided people with a huge amount of information and more importantly, a chance to interact with people around the world through e-mail, newsgroups and homepages. This is where our project comes in. We plan to create a web page for the Doha College. Our plan will include using our knowledge of the Internet standard language, HTML, as well as a web authoring program. The one I have at present is Microsoft Front Page, but shareware versions of Hot Dog and other tools are available online for free. After creating the page we plan to publicise it through popular search engines such as 'Yahoo!' and 'Webcrawler'. Finally we will show the page to the IT department for evaluation. Once the page is up and running, heads of different departments. can write and update different material on their part of the page. This goes one step further than the Doha College's current publicity system because it will make the school known to Internet users around the world.
Our first draft for this project will be on a web site that offers its users free web sites. We already have an account on this site which includes a free homepage (http//:www.geocities.com/sunsetstrip/alley/3321) and an email address which we have not used yet. The disadvantages of this is that Geocities is a huge web site that gets millions of hits a day, so access is slow and some times, during peak hours, impossible. Even though a web page at Geocities is initially free, upgrades for the page cost a lot of money over the long run. Things like memory upgrades, personalised voice greetings and Java applets are either hard to operate or have a monthly charge. This charge is tiny though when compared to the cost of getting an original .com URL. Something like HTTP://WWW.DOHACOLLEGE.COM would cost an initial fee of $100.00. Banners on the top web pages like Yahoo! Can cost up to ten times that amount per week.
The advantages definitely outweigh the disadvantages though. A very small obscure web site gets visited by about ten people a day. With very high publicity inside the college and Doha in general, the Doha College homepage can guarantee at least triple that amount in one day from Q-tel users alone. Regular listing in all the top search engines is usually free. Things like counters are available from the web counter homepage at HTTP://WWW.DIGITS.COM. The counters count how many people visit a page. HTML text can be copied from one page to another through any browser. The latest versions of web authoring tools are becoming less expensive and are capable of many more tasks such as Java and background sound. The recent introduction of the new Qatar homepage (HTTP://WWW.QATAR-ONLINE.COM) and a serge in Internet users in the Gulf has made publicity easy. URLs of pages can be added at no cost to sites such as Qatar and Emirates-online. If we face a problem with any aspect of building the web page, online help is vastly available, with thousands of pages dedicated to help on one aspect alone. The web page construction will also be influenced by feedback from visitors through email.
We will need a lot of software to make the web page complete. The first thing we will need is an Internet connection with a server. We have one with Q-tel. which includes access to the Internet (QR6.00 an hour) and an email account (akkad@qatar.net.qa). The Q-tel. account can be very slow at times, and if a lot of users connect at one time the server may overload. The dial-up screen of Q-tel. is not very big on security. Many people have managed to hack into the password files. But Q-tel. is improving and access is much quicker than it was three months ago. The second thing we need is the latest version of a popular browser such as Netscape Navigator 3.0+ or Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.01+. Browser models are being upgraded all the time with Both 4.0 Versions of I.E. and Navigator being released soon. The capabilities of the best browsers include Java and ActiveX controls which allow animation and other multimedia to be viewed on the Internet. They can also view the HTML source of documents on the Internet which can be copied onto other sites. Plug-ins are available for all browsers and platforms which can make the Internet more dynamic with CD-quality sound and movies that can be played with Plug-ins such as Shockwave and RealAudio. Most browsers come with mail and news programs to send and receive mail and post to and read Newsgroups.