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COMP 523: Software Engineering

Assignment 1: Web Site

Due

Tuesday, September 7th at 8am (because Monday 9/6 is Labor Day)

Context

Your team’s web site should contain all the information that your mentor, the TA, and I will need to understand your project, your plans, and your progress. All of your team assignments will be available from your website. It will also be a useful record for your client and for future COMP 523 students to learn about your project. Thus, this assignment is about creating a vehicle for various kinds of collaboration.

Furthermore, certain questions below are intended to help you establish some ground rules for collaboration among your team. Anything you decide can change later, so you’re not locked in. But it can be useful to have these conversations early to establish shared expectations among the team.

Requirements

There are two types of requirements: content and structure. Additionally, the site must be published somewhere. When it is finished, email the URL to me at terrell@cs.unc.edu and I will post it to the class website.

Content requirements

Your web site should include the following information:

Structure requirements

Although I dislike constraining artistic expression, I want you to conform to the following structure for the site. (I’m constraining you here for two reasons: consistency among sites makes it easier for me and the TA to navigate, and I suspect you have more important things to do than to craft a web site.)

Deployment

Deploy your site wherever you like. Below are some ideas.

Most (maybe even all) projects in the fall 2019 semester used web.unc.edu to create and manage their site with WordPress. As of fall 2020, web.unc.edu has been replaced with tarheels.live. Both of these options use Wordpress as a content management system (CMS).

I use Netlify to host this website. It lets you create a site as a folder, then deploy the directory to the web via git. A good pairing with Netlify is an SSG, or static site generator, which compiles content, typically written in Markdown, into a static web site in a directory. Popular ones include Jekyll, Hexo, and Hugo, but there are plenty to choose from. I even wrote my own for this site and the App Lab site.

Lastly, GitHub Pages could be a good option, although I haven’t used it myself.