Web Technical Report

Due:

Proposal Memo, May 1

Final version, May 29

Topic: Your topic should be technical and related to your field and/or interests. You can do one of two things. A.) You can identify a need for information in some community and create a document to satisfy that need. An example would be a guide to computing on the GT campus. Or, B.) You can identify some problem and make recommendations for a solution. An example would be a scheme for scheduling meetings at Georgia Tech.

In either case, you can choose a work-related situation or something pertaining to senior design.

Here are some titles from previous reports:

• A Proposed Upgrade for AT&T's Existing Copper Network
• Georgia Tech's Placement System: Computerizing the Center
• Design for a Manual Fire System for the Phi Kappa Sigma Fraternity House
• Material's Management for Emergency Services at Dekalb Medical Center

Forbidden Topics: campus crime, campus parking, the Olympics, restaurant/entertainment guides

Remember the three questions:

Who is my audience?
What is my goal?
--> What strategies should I use? (consider constraints)

Audience: Determine an audience. Specific both primary reader(s) and secondary readers. Pay most of your attention to the primary readers, but be careful not to alienate the secondary readers. Consider both demographic and psychological attributes of your audience.

Goal: What do I want that audience to know, to be able to do, to believe when they walk away from my document?

Strategies: Consider content, organization (depends on audience's needs and interests), look and feel of design (should be clear and appealing to that audience), etc.

Constraints: Your documents will be stored on your prism accounts, so the available file space is one constraint. You can get a file allocation increase by talking to OIT. You need a topic that you can research and write a complete document on by the due date.

Depending on the topic, you may or may not need to do research. Your research may consist of using what you already know, observing and taking notes on a situation, or conducting interviews and surveys. Whatever the source of your information, gather it, organize it within the report, and document it.

Length: The equivalent of ten-fifteen printed pages of text, with at least four visuals and appropriate supplements. Digitized sounds or movies might also be appropriate.

Format: Traditional reports are broken down into categories like:

"Front" Matter:

Title Page

Table of Contents

Abstract

Body:

Content and sequence of body elements depends on audience and purpose. For a list of possible elements see Chs. 15 or 17.

"End" Matter:

Printed reports frequently have end matter (appendixes, glossaries, etc.) but in an HTML document, this type of information can be incorporated more gracefully by constructing links. For example, if you use an unfamiliar word, then you can simply create a link whereby the reader can click on the unknown word and go to a page with the definition.

I put "Front" and "End" matter in quotation marks because HTML documents problematize the very idea of having beginnings and ends to documents. Whereas a paper document has a definitive start and finish, an HTML document follows a much less linear path.

Part of your challenge is to design a document that takes advantage of the possibilities that HTML offers. That is, don't just take a normal report and slap it onto the Web in a linear fashion. Looking at a variety of Web documents is the best way to begin conceptualizing your own reports.

Make sure to consult the list of Required Elements.

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