Motivation
Every summer, incoming freshmen chatter with their parents and peers about how to fill out the "Approaching Stanford" housing form.  They have many questions, such as "what is ethnic housing?" and "what exactly is FroSoCo?"  Of course, the answer is out there on the internet, hidden several clicks underneath the Undergraduate Academic Life homepage, but by no means easy to find.  In fact, the easiest solution at the moment is to just ask a friend who goes to Stanford, but not everybody has the luxury of doing so.

A similar situation exists for continuing students.  Every year as Spring Quarter rolls around, Stanford students start thinking about where to live next year.  In particular, freshman going into their sophomore year are especially concerned about their first experience with Stanford's Draw, an elaborate raffle of sorts designed to fairly assign students to the various dormitories on campus.  It sounds simple enough, but there are so many important details that it often leaves freshmen lost.  A quick look at the Stanford Housing website shows just how complicated this process is--there are so many different numbers, dates, and factors that affect the final assignment.  With so many choices and no single comprehensive source of information, freshman often end up consulting upper classmen for advice.

Not only that, but there is no single good source of information regarding the subjective aspects of the various residence halls.  For many weeks prior to the Draw deadline, students ask each other "How is the dorm culture in Branner?  How good is the food?".  These quesitons can only be answered by the students themselves.  This site is meant to address this lack of information availability, and to act as a centeral repository for students' opinions on dormitory life in general.

Objective, Target Audience
This Stanford Undergraduate Housing Tutorial website is meant to be a central source of everything regarding housing at Stanford, from the Draw to how to furnish one's room.  It is catered towards incoming freshmen and to-be sophomores looking for information on how to sign up for housing, and what the different housing options are.  However, it will also contain valuable information on many other aspects, such as how to apply to be a Resident Assistant, which applies to upperclassmen as well.  Unlike the Stanford Housing website which acts more as a reference piece and lists all the detailed numbers and dates, this site is meant to be a tutorial of sorts to guide readers in the right direction.  It is also meant to be a much more accessible site that is easy to read.


Marketing Plan
With a fairly small target audience, word of mouth will probably be sufficient to increase awareness of the website.  However, circulating emails on the various mailing list is a way to make sure that everybody at least knows of the existence of this website.  Sending out such an email about a month before the Draw would maximize the impact and coverage, since that is when students are most interested in the topic, and would be tempted to actively read it and pass it on.  Trying to advertise at other points during the academic year would not yield as much interest, since most students already receive many similar "advertising" emails, and would not give this site too much attention.

Competition
There are a few other sites sponsored by Stanford that host similar information--the Stanford Housing website, and the Resident Education website.  These sites are informative, although extremely hard to navigate.  Right now, most students tend to simply ask upperclassmen and the staff in each residence for detailed questions, since reading through the Stanford Housing website is simply too laborious.  In addition, the currently available information is solely factual--they list numbers, facts, and deadlines, but nothing that would help students make decisions on what living in the residences is like.  Thus, this website aims to fill in the gap of providing students both facts and opinions through articles and tutorials supplemented by the ability for students to request information from other students.

Implementation Plan
First and foremost comes organization, as seen from the student perspective.  I will design this website in such a way that anybody who comes to the front page will be able to immediately find what they're looking for within one or two clicks.  To do this, I need to conduct some interviews with current students about the kinds of questions they have had about housing in general.  This allows me to define the broad categories that most students' questions fit into.  From there, I will write articles and tutorials on the various categories that seem to garner the most interest amongst my interviewees.  I will also interview students from the various residences on campus in order to establish what a preliminary understanding of what each of them are like, so that I can kick-start a forum of sorts that displays various students' reviews.

Development Costs
This site has a moderate development cost, but is fairly low maintenance.  Development requires a comprehensive understanding of the Draw System, as well as the various dormitory lifestyles that exist on campus.  Although much of this information can be gleaned from upperclassmen, it still requires a significant effort to acquire accurate information.  However, once that is done, there is not too much maintenance necessary, as housing policies and dorm cultures do not change very rapidly.  For fairly good information, about five interviews per dormitory need to be conducted.  This adds up to approximately 100 man hours of interviewing, or about $1000.

Maintenance Costs
Occasionally, this site will be updated with information about the changes that have taken place.  As Stanford's undergraduate population increases in the years to come, there is no doubt that the housing office will have to bring about change.  However, many aspects of the website rely on student feedback, so some parts of the content maintenance is done by the users themselves.  Thus, content maintenance probably costs on the order of $30 per year, assuming it takes three hours to write up all the changes for that year.  Administrative maintenance, such as hosting costs is fairly cheap--on the order of $70 per year.  Since this will be hosted on a paid server, technical support will be free.  Thus, in total, this site will probably require $100 of maintenance costs per year.

Revenue Source
Since this site targets almost the entire Stanford undergraduate population, it could benefit from advertising.  Sites hosted on the Stanford domain are not allowed to host advertisements, so by hosting this site outside of the Stanford network, we are likely to have a likely chance at corporate advertising sponsorship, which would easily offset the annual $100 maintenance cost.  Even without a corporate ad, using Google AdSense would give us about $0.20 per click, so we only need 500 clicks to offset the maintenance costs.  With at least 4000 students expected to visit the site continually for the few months prior to the draw and move-in, this can add up to about at a minimum of $1000 of revenue per year.  This is more than enough to cover maintenance, and enough to start covering the initial development cost of $1000.