For this assignment, you'll create a single Web page that will serve as your personal home page for this course. Rather than just a page of information, try to think of this page as your virtual living room for entertaining and helping people from the class.

This page will introduce you to me and to your classmates--both verbally and visually--and provide links to all your class projects and exercises, as well as to external Web sites that you would like to collect for yourself and your classmates. We will continue to add to, improve and revisit these pages during the semester.

The Convergence of Public and Personal

Though you will have lots of drips and drabs of content to put on this page (listed below), excellent personal course home pages also have a unified feel and effect. After all, the page represents you and not just a grab bag of topics and links.

What you put on this page should therefore not only express the public you (as a resume or professional site would) but also, at the same time, suggest something of the individual, personal you (your tastes, background, experiences, values, and so on). In fact, you should write and visualize this page to suggest how the public and personal come together, mingle, synthesize into a unified you.

Ultimately, this intersection of the public and personal is where each of us lives and develops. It's where we find a voice.

Required Content

In addition to bringing the public and personal into unifying contact, the Personal Course Home Page should also include:

• your name
• your major and year
• a main image or graphic, possibly included in a banner at the top of the page
• a "mailto" link containing your e-mail address
• two or three items of recent news, accomplishments, trips you've taken, etc. with relevant links if you can think of them. This section might have its own heading, which might be text or could be an “imagetext” done in Photoshop.
• The sections on this page should each their own headings to distinguish them visually from one another. These headings might simply be text, formatted in the available levels of headings and perhaps in colors, or could be “imagetext” headings done in Photoshop. Consider how these various headings might unify the page by suggesting themes of design or of your interests.
• a section of links to your various course projects from COMP 5230 (use project names, not numbers)
• a separate section for links to your course exercises (use exercise titles)
• several links to Web sites that you both like and think are helpful to look at in terms of Web design (with a couple of sentences microcontent for each saying what your classmates should look for in the design when they follow the link). You might include some images or icons from these sites to introduce them visually.
• other items, information, content or statements you think might be helpful or interesting to your classmates with accompanying images.
• an area where you might add links later to further pages in this site. Think about what other pages you might include.

What Makes This Project Interesting

Think of this page as both expressing your tastes, interests, and experiences while also serving the needs of your professor and classmates. The living room analogy is apt: this page should be comfortable for your intended guests, but also a place where you can live.

Criteria

In designing the page, you should consider

• how the public and personal themes are integrated into a unified sense of who you are
• where the various kinds of information should appear in the page layout: for example, near the top (important) or toward the bottom (less important),
• how to make optimal use of screen real estate
• how related information can be grouped, and the groupings made distinct from one another (use of proximity)
• the degree of "texture" you can give the page (the sense of voice, an individualizing look and feel)
• how big or small the textual information should be,
• what should be "visualized" with an image or not,
• what design elements (images, colors, fonts, page layouts) you might repeat in subsequent pages of this site (if and when you make them) to unify and "brand" them as constituting the same "place."
• how you might use the Web-design tools of font, size, color, headings, white space, menus, bullets, etc. to distinguish one kind of information from another and to create a sense of order, flow and proportion on the page.
• the degree you can design the page without non-content pixels (bars, clip art, visible table borders, etc.)

Sample Pages

Take a look at some sample home pages on the Web to see how people have attempted to direct traffic among various kinds of audiences, intended uses, kinds of information or content, etc. on their home pages. Of course, not everything you find will be models you'll want to follow. To get you started, here's Internet researcher Christian Sandvig's home page. Have a go at my own home page if you like, or these pages by John Kapla and Greg Rupp from a previous class. What other home pages can you find to consider from the perspective of this creative design challenge?