Meghan Brueggemann's Design Document

Purpose

The goal of this website is to provide a "one-stop shop" for parents, students, and teachers in the Washington School District orchestra program. Users will visit this website for a number of reasons:

By visiting this website, the users will have a comprehensive view of what is happening in the program as well as a chronological understanding of deadlines.

Use Cases

Use 1:

An orchestra director visits the Webpage to find out what roles are still needing to be filled concerning our extra-curricular events (i.e. fundraiser or festival). She navigates to the Fundraiser page. She will take note of the various roles that are still available. She will select the link to the sign-up page. She will take note of how many positionas are still open. She will then use the information to reach out to parents with more specifically noted needs.

Use 2:

A parent visits the Webpage to get final details for an upcoming concert. The parent will find the date on the embedded calendar and select the concert. The calendar will pull up details about the concert, including details on the dress code, arrival times, and the student expectations. The parent can also access the information through their child's grade level page, under the "forms" link. This link will have a downloadable version of the concert letter that is sent home from school.

Use 3:

A student visits the page to find resources for a piece of music being studied in class. The student will navigate to the "Media" tab, and select the "Reference" tab. The student will then select the link to the piece they are looking for that will connect them to the publisher's website, where professional recordings are available for exactly this purpose.

Audience

The audience for this webpage is quite broad in identity, but very local in terms of geography. The audience will be mostly students, between the ages of 10-18, and adults, 30-70 years old. It will encompass all genders. The users will mostly be located in and around Washington, Missouri. Most of the users will be familiar with computers and the internet as our school district has switched to primarily digital form in most aspects. Students are also 1:1 and have been raised in the technological age. The average user will find the flow of this webpage to be relatively familiar as it is loosely modeled on our existing school district webpage. Additionally, some of the parents and students will have had access to our old website, which wasn't as specific since it was through the district. This webpage will act similarly, but the page will be able to provide more accessability and design.

Reference Websites

Washington School District: This website has a multi-leveled user interface which works well with a program like my own. I like the fact that you have a very streamlined path to get to where you need to be through the tabs across the top of the page beneath the banner. As a user of this particular website, I find it very easy to navigate, and I think my students and their parents do as well.

Washington High School Bands: This website is for another part of the music program in my district. The band and orchestra are both quite large programs, encompassing 200-300 students in each. Also similar to our program, the band holds several extra events, like a marching festival, each year. They are the group who informed us of the "Time To Sign Up" program, where parents can see how many slots need to be filled, making it less of a blind process. Since they hold extra events as we do, I would like to include tabs for our fundraising and events as well.

Parkway North High School Orchestra: From this site, I would like to follow the pattern of having the navigation bar near the top, and including navigational links in an easy-to-find place on each page. I also really like the contact information being at the top of the page, regardless of which page you are on. Beyond these two functions, I am not a fan of how busy the design is, and that the text is mostly all placed right on the page in an unorganized way. I do not plan to have that much free text on my pages.

Sikeston Public Schools: I originally went to this page because I really liked the organization of the orchestra page through this district. However, I stopped at the home page for the district, because it is designed very differently from my own district's page. It helped me to identify traits that I am not terribly fond of. This page has all the links that my own district's page has, but they are scattered all over the page, and take a bit of searching to find them. I find the homepage to be very busy, and I had a hard time finding the tab to choose a school. If nothing else, this solidifies my decision to do a "less is more" website that is visually stimulating but easily navigated.

Elk Grove High School Orchestra: This page belongs to my sister's program in Elk Grove, Illinois. I found this page to be visually pleasing and very informative. The media used on the home page is attractive to the eye, but the actual homepage is relatively brief in construction. Her navigation pages are similar to the style I like, although maybe more links than I would like to use. I do really like that the social media tags are also included on this page! I did not, however, like the font used for the title, as it seems a little busy.

Needs Assessment

To determine if this website would, in fact, be helpful to my orchestra program, I interviewed a dozen or so members from varying parts of the program: My co-teacher, several parents, and several current students. I gave the interviewees a very brief overview of why I was interviewing them and what the website goal would be.

Questions:

1.) Why will this website be important to you?

Responses included:

2.) How often will you use this site?

Responses included anywhere from weekly (for the parents of students in the younger grades), bi-monthly for most students, and monthly for the high school parents.

3.) What specific things would you go to this website to find out?

Responses included:

Content

Based on my interviews, my website will contain the following pages:

Click here to see my website's wireframe

Presentation of Information/Rationale of Organization

The website will contain one home page, with tabs to navigate through to the other main pages. Within those tabbed pages, there will be a variety of choices for the user to click to get the information they need.