Project: Personal Web Site

 

Lucky you! This project involves very little writing. What I want you to do is to create a very simple home page and another linked page (or frame) containing a brief, autobiographical, "about me" sketch and get both up and running on the University server as early in the semester as possible, at least by the end of the third week of class. There will be four checkpoints for this project: the preliminary one is just to see how you're getting on and garners no points; the second, third, and fourth ones have specifics and points attached. See the syllabus for details.

For some of you, because you are computer savvy to the max, this assignment may seem very elementary. If so, I hope you will lend your expertise to those in the class who lack your experience and know-how. If you do help others, I do not want you to make a home page for them using all the bells and whistles that you may have used in creating your own home page.

Those who have never created html documents must learn how to do so, ftp them to the school’s server, and maintain and modify them as needed. If “html” and “ftp” mean little or nothing to you, a pre-masticated chunk of, say, a Macromedia Flash MX file provided by someone else will not hack it. You have to learn the basics.

In case you wondered, "html" and "ftp" (or FTP) stand for, respectively, "hypertext markup language" and "file transfer protocol." The good news is that you do not have to learn html, although I certainly do not discourage you from doing that, or at least learning what it looks like.

In class you will be using Macromedia Dreamweaver to create your Web site. Dreamweaver is a program that automatically adds the necessary code for translating standard text into html text and provides a variety of design utilities. It is the Cadillac of Web page-generating programs available to us in HLG's computer classrooms. Although Dreamweaver may seem to be a rather intimidating program at first, you can learn the essentials pretty quickly–enough to create the Web site required for this course.

Your home page will remain a work in progress for the entire semester, and you will be adding elements to it as required by other assignments. You will be publishing your résumé as an online document accessed by a link on your home page, and you will also provide a link to your instructions so that a visitor to your home page can view them or download them as a Microsoft Word or WordPerfect file.

At the end-of-course checkpoint, I will require at least the following on your home page and your linked "about me" page:

  • Your name
  • A welcoming message to those visiting your home page
  • A link to your autobiographical page
  • An e-mail link to your University e-mail address
  • A link to the course home page
  • A page background using a graphic downloaded from the Internet
  • At least one other downloaded graphic (such as an animated e-mail .gif)
  • A link to your résumé
  • A link to your downloadable instructions

Your autobiographical page (or frame if you know how to create and use one) will contain the following:

  • Your "about me" sketch
  • A link back to your home page
  • A picture of yourself (optional)

This project will be undertaken as a hands-on, in-class adventure. Although we will be going over the process at length in class, you can do some preparation in advance by activating this link to the University's Help Desk's Publishing Web Pages on UCS where you will find out most of what you need to know about setting up a home page and ftp-ing it to the University server. Incidentally, the Help Desk personnel can often solve intractable problems we invariably encounter in class, so feel free to ask them for assistance. You can find these helpful folks in Room 201 in Stephens Hall.

If you already have a home page on another server, one that is elaborate and reflects your design genius and originality, fine. You may put a link to that on your more basic home page that you must create for this course using the University server as its host. You can gussy up that home page as well, but I suggest that you save your creative energy for other assignments. In any case, your home page on the University server must be named <index.html> (without the angle brackets) . Be sure "index" is all lower case and that the extension is "html", not "htm".

Here's the generic form of the url (universal resource locator) for your :home page:

http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~abc1234/index.html

For the "abc1234" substitute your own CLID, which consists of your initials and assigned numbers. (Note: the ULL server defaults to <index.html> if you attempt to reach your home page on any browser. That means that you can access your home page without including the <index.html> in your url.)

A couple of words of caution: when you put your home and related pages out in cyberspace, they are there for anyone to see, so be extra careful to make sure that your text is free of such embarrassments as blatant mechanical errors; and, please, don’t get cute and insert tasteless graphics of one kind or another. You are putting your home page and autobiographical sketch on the University server, and smut, no matter how cute, is simply not appropriate, nor are links to the same.

To satisfy the end-of-semester checkpoint, your home and "about me" pages plus your links to your résumé and downloadable instructions must be on the University server and accessible via any browser. The checkpoint grade of up to 50 points will be awarded after your portfolio is submitted (on the last day of class), even though it is the first project that you will work on this semester. There will be an initial, ungraded checkpoint in a class workshop at the end of the third week of class just to see how well you are progressing with your home and linked "about me" pages.