logistics
grading
points possible: 100
weight: 25%
due dates
design plan & storyboards: thursday, april 14 (at the end of class)
draft: thursday, april 28
final: thursday, may 5
deliverables
- an XHTML page (your .htm files) for each page of your site
- two primary stylesheets: one for screen viewing and one for printing
- the ”reset.css” stylesheet included in the RPK
- the “screen-ie.css” stylesheet if you need to adjust your code to work for the Internet Explorer 7 browser
- the appropriate graphics and media folders from the RPK with your image and media files included
- a two-page, double-spaced reflection (roughly 500 words)
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overview
The personal website project is the culminating project for the course. It allows you to expand your web design skills and use your rhetorical skills to promote yourself to potential employers, scholarship, internship, graduate school committees, etc. This project will follow steps similar to our earlier projects including a design plan and reflection.
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general requirements
- a multimodal design (i.e., the site should include more than text on a page)
- a clearly defined subject, purpose, and target audience
- a rhetorically justified visual design that applies the CRAP principles
- a navigation system appropriate to the purpose and target audience
- a total of 5-10 substantial pages when completed including
- an index page
- a portfolio of your academic or creative work. The portfolio should provide any context necessary for your audience to understand each project. For the purposes of this class your portfolio must include the Wired essay redesigned for the web plus at least three other items.
- a biography or “about me” page
- a resume or academic CV
- all steps in the process completed including the design plan, storyboards, and a draft for peer review day
Your site must be composed from scratch using a text editor and your own code writing skills. You may use Karl Stolley’s RPK and publicly available code for embedding video, creating photo slideshows, etc., but you may not “steal” the code from another website and use it as your own.
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design plan and storyboards
Your design plan should address the questions below. Now that you’ve had the opportunity to explore examples of personal web sites and to practice a little HTML code, you should be well situated to develop the initial plan for your own site. You need not answer every question below, and you may address each aspect of the design plan in whatever order you wish. Also, remember that this is an exploratory document—you don’t need to have every aspect of your project worked out right now.
your design plan should begin with an analysis of purpose, audience, and context:
- Purpose: What do you want to communicate to your audience about about yourself? Is your site an online portfolio with the purpose of helping you get a job, a scholarship, or entrance to graduate/professional school? Is the purpose to promote yourself as a member of a band or other artistic group?
- Audience: Who is your ideal audience? What is the audience’s demographics (age, gender, race, etc.)? What are their interests, hobbies, political and/or social leanings? What is their level of experience navigating the web? What expectations do you think your audience will have for your website given who they are and given your purpose?
- Context: What background knowledge are you assuming your audience will bring to your site? How do you imagine the situation in which they will view your web site: will they be drinking their morning coffee in a comfortable chair, sneaking a break at work? Will they be relaxed, worried, browsing leisurely, or looking for information quickly?
also consider the following:
- Medium: How will you take advantage of the multimodal and linking capabilities of the web in your design?
- Arrangement: How will you visually organize your site? What colors, graphics, and organization of information appealed to you when you were exploring the web sites you looked at in class? How might you arrange your information? For example, if you are a musician, will you provide audio clips? How will you divide information up onto different pages? Do you want your audience to have to scroll or click a lot?
- Strategies: How will you establish your authority or believability as an author (ethos)? Will you write in a formal, academic style or is it more appropriate to be conversational or funny or creative? Will you provide evidence that you have specialized knowledge (about your major, etc.) by using quotes from other sources, links to other information on the web, embedded audio, video, or still images? Do you want your site to appeal to your readers’ sense of logic and objective reasoning (logos) or appeal to emotion (pathos) or to both?
A storyboard is a sketch of what a webpage will look like. Each storyboard is accompanied by text that explains the written content and various media files that will be included on the page. Storyboarding originated in film where each shot of a film is drawn ahead of time indicating where the lighting and cameras will be placed. Wikipedia provides a basic history of storyboarding. Your storyboards may be designed by hand using this template or using a computer program. They should be in color and each storyboard should include a brief written explanation of the content.