English 420, Business Writing

Attached is a copy of my cover letter I used for the sales team.

We gave our White Paper presentation on Monday. Aside from forgetting to pass out the handouts and my typical nervousness it the presentation went smoothly. The review seemed to understand our options and we fielded their questions well.

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.

This week we spent many hours working to together on our white paper. After combining the four sections together last week, we worked to make them seamless and flowing. We incorporated many of the comments we were given to relate the information more to Knight Corporation. We also clarified many of our statements and elaborated on points that we made.

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.

This week we did our presentation on Dreamweaver which I think went successfully. After the presentation, the rest of the week (until Wednesday when we turned in the draft of our white paper) was spent working on and combining the elements of our white paper. I tried to make the changes that were suggested to make the writing sound more in terms of Knight Corporation. I also added information on servers and server space needed to different calibers of websites. The IBM website had a survey that made a recommendation as to which server would be the best for a company’s use.

This week we took significant steps in starting the composition of our white paper. It was decided that Tabby would write the section on marketing and advertising, Evan would write the section on hiring a third party to construct the site, and I would write the sections on payment systems and web design. In the web design portion of the paper, I presented statistics that will help Knight Corporation pin-point their audience and that audience’s technical capabilities.

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.

This week's emphasis was on the agenda for our technology presentation which we will do on Wednesday. Our program is Dreamweaver so we started by looking at and working with the program to familiarize ourselves with its features and capabilities. It functions like a word-processing document so it should be easy to most people who have worked with Microsoft Word. We did some online research to see how to best break down the process of creating an html file. We noted this information and used our own knowledge to compose a step-by-step handout of how to create a Dreamweaver file.