This web site is the result of about three-fourths of a year of international collaboration by Team 26026 in the ThinkQuest contest.At the start of the process, we held numerous meetings on ICQ and discussed the site
thoroughly over email. We had to decide what we wanted to cover in the site and what areas we should focus on.
Eventually, we put together a plan for what our site would contain. Many of our ideas would change in the coming months as we came up with new ideas and replaced old ones. Nevertheless, we did develop a strong outline of our site which remains largely intact.
This allowed us to begin the first phase of the project, writing the content. David and Caroline
divided up the topic areas based on where we had outside knowledge and interest. Next, we checked out dozens of books from the local university library and researched each subject area on the web.
Once we had sources of information, we began writing the articles. By the time we had finished, we had 400 articles for the site. Later on, we found images and other multimedia to accompany the text we had written.
After we had begun writing the articles, we began working on
laying out the structure of the site. Using NetObjects Fusion, we broke our site down into twenty sections and created numerous subsections within them. We then color-coded the pages and sections in the site based on what work still needed to be done and who needed to do it, as shown below.
The next step was to begin the basic design of the site. We created a MasterBorder in NetObjects Fusion for our site and began developing the components of the template.
Using Adobe Photoshop, we created the site title banner, the page banner, and all of the navigation buttons for the horizontal and vertical navigation bars. We then brought these elements into Fusion, created one master template for the
entire site, then created twenty section-specific templates for all of the pages within each section.
At that point, we began working on some of the smaller subsections of the site. Once these were finished, Michael worked on the programming projects and incorporated these features into the Fusion file.
When David and Caroline resumed working on the site in Fusion, they added all of the articles and content-related features. They also finished all of the
other features on the site that were not yet complete.
When the project was finished, we posted it on the server for everyone to see. The contest ended on August 15 and the web sites became publicly accessible.
There were many
