Teaching Website Design in Business Classes

Gary Gereffi
Renan Levine
Martha Martinez

Markets & Management Studies Program
Duke University
Durham, NC 27708 / USA

Paper prepared for presentation at the Hawaii Conference on Business (http://www.hcb.hawaii.edu), Honolulu, Hawaii, June 14-17, 2001.

In this paper, the authors share experiences and lessons culled from two years of integrating a group web-design project within a core undergraduate business course at Duke University. We are happy to share our experiences teaching website design. Instructors interested in learning about our experiences, the challenges we faced and the lessons we learned might want to consult our list of Frequently Asked Questions. Our experience suggests that incorporating website projects within a class is a worthwhile venture that can be improved in the course of several semesters. By continually evaluating the class and the project we were able to modify the project and tailor the training components to the particular needs of the students. We hope that this paper provides a useful overview of how we integrated website design with industry analysis within a business class. Below are several files (PDF format) that might be of interest to those interested in the course and the website assignment. Please e-mail us if you have any further questions about our paper, the assignment or our classes.

  • Course Syllabus, Sociology 142, "Organizations and Global Competitiveness." Professor Gary Gereffi, Spring 2001
  • A description of the Global Industry Website Group Project from Spring 2001.
  • To help guide the students' efforts, deter procrastination, minimize last minute crises and focus attention on essential tasks (rather than flashy illustrations), we passed out a timeline that established intermediate deadlines and expectations for each of the eight weeks of the project. Created with assistance from Yixin Gu.
  • This assignment was designed to give every student some basic familiarity with webpage design. Each student was required to complete a simple webpage with key elements (such as a table and links) that presents WTA data. Sample
  • An important part of the assignment was the requirement for students to review other teams' projects and to evaluate the contributions of each team member to the collective effort.