Welcome!

Welcome to Polk County High School's 2010 web design entry!

There is a lot to check out on this website, and we hope you enjoy your visit. Since there is so much to see we wanted to dedicate a page explaining how we built this website and the tools we used. The goal of our website is to reach out to our local community and educate them about our FBLA Chapter and all of the projects that we do. We also want other businesses and organizations to get involved with our chapter, so that we may have the opportunity to help our community.

The tabs at the top direct you to the different steps of our development process.

Planning

Our first major task was determining how we were going to build our website. We came to the decision of building two different website's, with the same goal in mind. Our first website would be a full Flash website, and our second would be an HTML website. After both of us sat down and designed our blueprints for each website, we compared the two and decided to go with both because we liked both designs equally. We also included a special javascript code to detect whether the user has flash or not to determine which site they are directed to, and also a special link for those users with iPhone's and Android mobile devices. You may be wondering why we chose to do two websites. Our main reason was accessibility. Not all users can view flash or want to view flash, so giving them the option to see our HTML page allows us to reach out to everyone in our community. Another step in our planning phase was thinking of how we could reach out to our community effectively and who our target audience would be. So after much brainstorming and several notebooks worth of paper, we came to an agreement on these two sites.

Building

Next we began our building phase. In this phase we gathered the needed information for each page and, of course, built the sites themselves. During this phase we also created the graphics and optimized any images. All images and graphics were created using: Adobe Photoshop CS4, Adobe Fireworks CS4, GIMP, and Adobe Illustrator.

Our Flash website was created using Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, and our HTML website was hand coded using a variety of Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, Notepad ++, and Microsoft Expressions Web 3. Other pages attached the Flash website were created using Adobe Dreamweaver CS4. The videos on both websites were edited using Adobe Flash CS4 and Adobe Premier CS4. Other tools involved in the building of this website were Google Documents, Microsoft Word, Notepad, and Microsoft Windows 7.

We found the using Google Documents allowed my teamate and I to organize and share the information and tasks easily. Which allowed us to be more productive in the building of the site itself.

Testing

Our final and most important phase is the testing phase. During this process we make any final changes and tested our website for accessibility. One of the most important things is making sure that your website is fully functional and accessible to everyone. Below is a list of browsers that both the Flash and HTML web site are functional in.

• Internet Explorer 8
• Firefox 3
• Opera
• Google Chrome
• Safari

To view these sites properly and make use of all of its features you need the Adobe Flash® Player plugin. It is also recommended to enable JavaScript capabilities in your web browser.