Project Summary

Client: Friends of Education

Project Description: New site for http://www.improvek-12education.org

Introduction:
Friends of Education is a non-profit organization that helps allocate funding from the government for the creation and ongoing support of “charter” schools. The way the school system in the US works is that the government funds public schools with tax money but there are a lot of rules and regulations for public schools – they are essentially run by the government. There are also private schools which charge individuals directly to attend (and the fees are generally very high) and don’t have to adhere to almost any rules at all. And there are charter schools which are funded by government funds but are run independently with fewer rules than normal public schools, the idea being that they can be kind of like private schools that people can afford to go to.

Friends of Education is similar to samnllc.org in the sense that it is one-level up in terms of responsibility and power in terms of allocating funds and creating the guidelines for charter schools to follow.

Goals for the website:
The goals of the site are to make information on Friends of Education easily accessible to the public, allow charter schools to get the application information they need easily, give authorized charter schools access to a file management sharing system, and also allow people to compare public schools to charter schools with a Data Project comparison feature. Please note that this feature is being created by a 3^rd party and we’ll be adding it to the website after the initial build, so don’t implement the links for it in the mockups yet.

Budget approach:
The client hasn’t given us an exact budget for this website and it’s certainly larger than it was for samnllc.org. They do want to keep costs low and our best guess is they’d like the project to come in under 90 hours. Don’t hesitate to include additional line-items on the estimate if there are simpler ways to do any parts of the site than the way we planned.

Notes:
The client is hosting the site with us.
Mockups are schematic and can be changed if the development team has an improved or more efficient way for implementing something.

Planned sitemap: user end

- Home page – mockup 10 – Below the site header, this page has a big sliding banner area with an image and editable text area to link to other pages (mockups 10+13). The whole banner area should link to a URL or a different page on the site. There is also a content block “About HAS”, login block, and shop products banner. The popular categories should populate from the product categories in the system randomly. Also, please estimate them as fixed for these four categories as that’s all the client will have to start with.

- Mockup 11+12 – These are the drop-downs, they should be simple except have an extra selection layer for “how to apply” under “charter schools”

- Mission & History – mockup 20 – This is an example of a content-only page on the site. Note that on the right-hand side there should be an area for “downloadable resource” files managed on the admin side by the admin as well as html block banners below also manageable by the admin.

- How to Apply for a New School – Mockup 30 – Content-only page

- Core Knowledge – Mockup 40 – Content-only page mocked up to show how that math/science/history chart should look when setup for the site build

- Authorized Charter Schools – Mockup 50 – this should be a manageable list on the admin end

- News & Events – Mockup 60 – standard news & events page that lists news items manageable on admin site

- Contact – mockup 70 – simple form and editable content block

- Login Section – mockup 80-83 – The admin will be able to create logins for members of each authorized school and when logged in, these members will be able to download any file on the system or upload their own files for others to download from the system. Mockup 80 is the page users should first see when they login.

- Mockups 80+81 – These mockups show the area of the login that allows users to use filters and a search field to find the types of files they are looking for and then download them. Please note that the user should be able to edit or delete any file he/she originally uploaded to the system but none others. There are two mockups to demonstrate that “summative assessment number” is only for summative assessments.

- Mockups 82+83 – These mockups show the area of the login that allows users to upload their own files to the system. There are drop-downs for them to select between fixed information and then fields to write-in the title and goal of the file they’re uploading so other users will know if they’re interested in downloading it or not.

- There doesn’t need to be a profile section or ability for logged in users to do anything else. The admin will create their accounts but there should be a “forgot password” link on the login screen that resets the user’s password and notifies the admin to create a new one for the user.

Planned sitemap: admin end

The admin mockups should hopefully make sense given the developer notes in red. If there are question, please don’t hesitate to ask and the AT will clarify them.