Guidelines for Student Web Projects

Many departments hire students to develop, update and/or maintain web sites or web pages. Many academic departments also encourage students to develop web pages or sites as part of the "hands-on" learning in a class.

CITS has established a set of guidelines to help you evaluate students' web skills. In addition, we require notification, early in the process, of any projects that you expect to reside on the official UMass Dartmouth web site. Because it is our responsibility to maintain the overall security, quality and reliability of the UMass Dartmouth web site, we reserve the right to modify or reject web projects that do not meet minimum standards of development, data security, usage and design.

CITS is available to meet with and advise students on a regular basis. If space is available, we welcome students to work in our office environment.

For more information, contact:

Web Design & Development (Don King, Manager, x8575)
Information Systems Development & Integration (Holger Dippel, Manager, x9181)

1) Verify student skills

Most students looking for web-related jobs list HTML, SQL, one or the other server-side web technologies (ASP, JSP, PHP, ColdFusion CFML) or other operating systems and programming languages on their resume. Not all of these apply specifically to the UMass Dartmouth web environment and do not necessarily reflect "hands-on" experience.

UMass Dartmouth's supported technology is:

• Apache web server with Adobe (formerly Macromedia) ColdFusion running on a Linux platform
• Oracle database

When evaluating a student's skills, determine if s/he has:

• Experience working with the above combination of technology
• If your project involves a database, knowledge of relational database design and fluency in SQL
• Real world web project experience beyond class assignments. Ask about level of involvement and what role(s) s/he had in the project
• If the student will be working with large amounts of text, proficiency in English-language usage, spelling and grammar. Ask for writing samples

If you have any doubts about a student's skills, please feel free to send the resume and a short description of the project to us. We will be happy to talk to the student about the expectations and requirements of the project and provide feedback on the student's qualifications.

2) Involve CITS teams at an early stage of the project

CITS requires that you consider how your project resides on the UMass Dartmouth web server:

• Who will support the end users?
• Who will resolve technical issues?
• Who will test it after server updates are applied?

CITS can assist with:

• Advising on existing services, data and tools prior to the start of the implementation
• Assisting in choice of technology to ensure that the project is implemented in a technology supported by CITS
• Advising on a realistic implementation timeline
• Ensuring that the student utilizes available web components readily provided by CITS

3) CITS is not able to support or accept

• Projects that duplicate functionality provided by the University's administrative systems or by CITS services
• Projects that collect and take ownership of data that is housed in the University's administrative systems
• Projects in which CITS becomes the owner of auxiliary data and is responsible for the data management
• Web applications that lack efficiently-written source code and/or proper documentation

It is essential for the longevity of each web project that UMass Dartmouth's naming conventions, development guidelines and standard coding practices are enforced. There is a wealth of information at the Web team's Cold Fusion Project site.