Planning The Project
This week we look at the planning that goes into a successful Shockwave project. I personally plan projects using this method religiously. You may want to adjust the parameters we discuss into a format that fits your needs, but this generic project-planning scheme should work well for most projects.
The Internet is accessed by millions of people worldwide. By publishing on the Internet, it is possible to reach people from every social, economic, ethnic, and political background. The Internet empowers every publisher by leveling the field of entry, and by eliminating the traditional barriers that prohibit wide-spread communication. This, however, can be a great disaster waiting to happen for projects that are not planned in advance. Think about it, what system do you use? Is it 24-bit color? Is it a Macintosh or a Windows machine? With all these questions surrounding the Internet, project planning becomes even more important.
Defining the Steps to a Successful Project
In order for your project to achieve eventual successful completion, you must first define the steps that will take you to that goal. Unfortunately, failure to lay out a detailed plan of your project will often lead to problems that cause unnecessary pain and agony down the road. Since the project we are working on is fairly large in size and uses several Shockwave movies, we'll spend this week defining the project in a project-planning lesson. Many Director users will refer to this process as "story boarding." This term is akin to the stage metaphor that Macromedia Director follows.
Establish your audience: Define who it is you want to see your project.
Establish your goals: Define what you would like to achieve with your audience.
Establish your timeline: Define not only when your project should be complete, but also establish intermediate "due dates" along the course of your timeline.
Create your concept: Develop a concept that applies to your audience, your goals, and your timeline. Analyze and compare your concept in depth, and research other project concepts that may help you in your design.
Define your content: Establish those items that will be needed to complete your project. This may include elements such as text, graphics, movies, sound, etc. Include all items you will be able to produce internally, and those that will come from external sources. Catalog those processes that the content requires for realization. Finally, determine how the entire project will be assembled.
A Quick Note about Bandwidth and Planning
Bandwidth is the weakest link on the Internet. The vast majority of the Internet community accesses the Web via traditional modem connections. If you are intending to reach the average Internet user, you must consider that he or shee will be able to download your content at a rate of around one to three kilobytes per second. If a graphic or movie on your page is 60 KB, it could take up to a full minute to download, just for that single element. The content of a single high-density floppy disk (1.44 megabytes) would take approximately 10-15 minutes to download using a 28.8 Kbps modem.
Remember this when planning the scope and complexity of your project's content! Having a great project on your server is not going to do you any good if know one can see it over the Internet. The size of a project can be very important in the planning stage of your projects.
Using these five steps (and the tip on bandwidth), you should be able to define a project and, in doing so, increase both the productivity and quality of your project. This is very important because working in Director without a plan can often lead to disaster.
Next week we begin the next phase of our project, including an outline of the project and a timeline.
