Schedule
September
October
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December

Assignment 1:
The Personal Home Page

• Assigned: Tuesday, September 3
• Posted to the Web: Sunday, September 22
• Print outs and commentaries due: Tuesday, September 24

What are the essential, creative challenges of designing a Web page?

For this assignment, you'll create a single Web page--the main ("index") page of a personal Web site-on which you'll attempt to solve several of these challenges.

The Creative Challenges:

• simultaneous multiple audiences: presenting yourself in ways that are individualizing, lively, and perhaps even true while also addressing the tastes and on-site tasks of multiple potential audiences at the same time: friends, classmates, parents, potential employers, etc.;
• iconography: using images on the page not only for eye appeal or to illustrate text, but also to establish unifying visual themes for this and other pages on your site;
• linking and labeling: providing links and link menus that are brief but descriptive, that distinguish internal and external destinations, and that use words that have meaning to your audiences;
• texture: creating a rich and effective first layer of content on the home page which conveys enough texture to capture interest and direct visitors to internal pages, but is brief and compact.

More Responsibilities:

In addition to these creative challenges, you will also be responsible for some of the techniques and principles covered in class and in the chapters we'll read in Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Usability. You can find the complete criteria for the assignment on the Assignment Checklist.

How Do You Know It's Me?

I'm presuming the home page you'll create will be your own.

If you already have a Web site, the design and look of the home page you do for this assignment should be different from your present page, though of course some of the content and topics may be the same.

You can also choose to create a home page for another person, though it should be a person who's willing to work with you to provide content and feedback, with whom you have regular contact, and who will not sue you.

Commentary and Print out

You will write, print and hand in a 2-3 page (double-spaced) self-commentary. Please see the complete Self Commentary Guidelines before writing it.

Also, print out a copy of the Web page and hand it in by the due date specified above.