Final Project Proposal

Working Title: Stephen Casmar's Consulting Page
Name: Stephen Casmar
E-Mail Address: donotemailme@spam.com
Date: July 8, 2011
Course and Section: EDTEC 541, Summer-2011, Online Section

Problem, Need, or Opportunity
In May of 2012 I will complete my contract with the American Embassy School in New Delhi India and my wife and I have decided to move back to the United States. At that time, I will not have a job waiting for me. In this economy, this may well be a problem. However, I will try to look at it as an opportunity! The time I will have, when not looking for a job, will provide me with an opportunity to throw my hat into the consulting arena and see what happens. I will need to highlight myself so that companies might get to know my work and me. Since technology consulting is what I hope to do, a website is a necessity. So, I will create a website to facilitate both an introductory experience for businesses that may be surfing looking for my kinds of services as well as offering rich background information on myself, that companies I may talk to can access to get to know my work better. I will want to show examples of my prior work, the services I will offer, talk about my prior experience, and highlight my educational background and teaching history.

Audience
The audience would include small and medium sized businesses that need software training, technical manuals, or instructional modules. I think that my audience would be split, with about 75 percent using my site as a means of further checking my credentials and looking over my services and about 25 percent getting their first introduction to me via the website. A secondary audience for the website may be potential employers that may Google me. Accessing the content of the site will be straightforward with navigation that is mostly mainstream today, tabs. The audience will need to be able to open Adobe PDF documents, as some of my material will be available in that format. Nearly all of my audience will be able to access both the navigation as well as the PDF files as they will be seasoned business professionals

User's Needs
I consulted two former colleagues in the technical education field as well as one business that had employed me in the past as a consultant. From them, I gleamed a number of suggestions and requirements that would make the website useful to them as possible users of consulting services.

  1. As I plan to offer software education, it was suggested that I provide a complete history of classes that I have previously taught.
  2. A complete CV for easy download should be available said the company I worked for as a consultant.
  3. Since I am hoping to bridge into Instructional Design, it was suggested that I include some links on the field itself; "even if just Wikipedia sites" so that people may wrap their head around what we do.
  4. Some colleagues suggested I include a link to my personal webpage so that possible employers could see the more human side of me.

I had to really think about how to highlight the important information as well as the peripheral information without making a big confusing mess of the website. The field of ID and my personal website is definitely peripheral information and should not appear as proximately as what I do, my past classes, and education. To solve this problem, I plan on using "top" tabs in addition to the in-body tabs to facilitate offering information of a more educational or peripheral nature. They are far less "obvious" than the in-body tabs but are still noticeable to the audience. Beyond these suggestions, I will keep the navigation clean and fully separate topics so that the audience in not overwhelmed with information that they may not be seeking.

Environment
All of my audience will most likely be using computers of less than three years old (the typical replacement cycle in a corporation) and have at least a fractional-T1 line to access the internet. The site will contain both textual and PDF information. I will save my PDFs in such a way that even three-year-old versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader will be able to open them; that is version 7.0 or later of Reader. Businesses routinely have printers, so the site will be made printer friendly. I will not use video on the site. As I get more consulting work or additional certifications, I will update the site.

Resources and Limitations
The content of my consulting website will be materials that I myself have crafted so copyright issues are not a factor in the website. The one exception is materials that I have made for corporations, where the corporation holds the copyright as part of our negotiated contract. I will contact them, if I wish to use their material, and ask for permission to display all or part of the documents I made for them.

This website will be a work in progress through March of 2012 when I hope to have it finished. This will give me two months, to start highlighting myself, prior to the time I will move back to the United States. I will begin by putting up the complete skeleton, including tabs, even if they lead to dead-ends. Since the site won't be used for some time, I can then continue adding content through March or 2012.

General Solution
Today, any business, even a one-man consulting firm, needs a website. I hope that my site serves the dual purpose of attracting new clients as well as cinching the deal with clients I may meet prior to them seeing my site. This site will be a place to showcase my work and past education and experience.


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