English 420, Business Writing

This week our group had our final meeting at Boiler Market before the project is due. We met Thursday with our contact Ben to show him our latest version of the updated pamphlet. This was our fourth update, and we had made several revisions from the original draft. Ben was very pleased with the pamphlet and had no more suggestions for improvement. We will be dropping off printed color copies of the pamphlet by Friday. Matt and I decided that since we had leftover money from our printing allowances, we would use the rest of our funds to supply color copies to the Boiler Market.

This week we met with both Mark and our Boiler Market contact Ben. We showed Mark our progress and a rough draft of the brochure we had been working on. We also talked about making a flyer and possibly tabletop advertisements for specials to replace the instruction manual we had originally planned on making (this is not needed because Copy Mat creates and maintains the document files for Boiler Market).

This week we met our contact Ben at Boiler Market to discuss our progress. Evan made a sample draft of the brochure that we had been planning for us to show Ben. We chose to get weekly updates on this project so our group could get constructive feedback about what Ben liked and what he would liked to be changed. That way, at the end of the year we could give the client exactly what they want. Evan did such an awesome job that he already really liked it.

Proposal 1 is for the client (Boiler Market)
Proposal 2 is for the class deliverables

This week we started our service learning project for Boiler Market. Boiler Market is a restaurant located on campus that also features alcoholic beverages, jazz music and catering services. On Friday, Matt and I met with Ben, the Manager, and discussed what he was looking for out of this project. He told us we would like a tri-fold pamphlet that highlighted the atmosphere, custom catering services, and also some of the more popular menu items that Boiler Market features. He also said he would supply the pictures that he would like us to use for the project.

This week we finished and presented our whitepaper presentation to the class and the Knight Corporation review board. The presentation went well, and we were able to successfully answer the questions the board asked us. Unfortunately, we forgot to pass out our handouts until after our presentation, but we did have them. The presentation went smoothly other than that. Our Dreamweaver site and the Braun homepage also opened correctly as planned, and the board seemed to better understand some of our ideas with the aid of the visuals.

This week the Sales Group tied up loose ends with the sales whitepaper and the presentation. We met on Easter Sunday in Hicks Digital Learning Collaboratory to make the slide show for our presentation and work on finalizing our whitepaper. We began the presentation by incorporated what we thought the take home points were from each of our sections of the paper onto slides.

Last week we turned in our rough draft of the whitepaper, which was a compilation of all three of our sections. Evan’s section was first and contained information on the possible options for who would set up the website. Possible options including using internal workers already on the Knight staff, outsourcing the job to a third party specializing in designing web stores, or lastly a combination of the two.

Here is my progress so far on my section of the Whitepaper (Management and Advertising): It needs some work and a little reformatting, but it is more of a rough draft at this point.

Our group’s main concern for this week was planning our upcoming technology presentation on Wednesday. We decided to make a handout to give to the class that will outline the basic steps for using Dreamweaver. We will then go through these steps slowly with the class together, and then we will show a sample webpage that we will have designed ahead of time. The sample page will illustrate what a site on Dreamweaver would look like. We will also insert some extra images and text at that point to give a demonstration on how to incorporate material.