For our second major design project of the semester, you will design and build a personal website to be hosted in your personal GVSU webspace. This site is for you and about you. Have some fun with it. One goal of the project is that you could continue to use the site after the project is over.
Since this is a personal website, you have a lot of freedom to build the site per your interests. Keep in mind that your site may be visited by people other than you and your friends: family members, GVSU faculty, or potential employers. This is also webspace hosted at a university. So learn from the mistakes of students who have put inappropriate content on MySpace or Facebook. Situate your site for a wide audience and provide at least some content that could have some appeal to someone looking to hire you.
Components
In addition to a home page, your site must contain other pages of content. You might consider adding a
- Photo gallery.
- Bio or About page.
- Some philosophical statement about your field, writing, art, creativity, or professionalism.
- Portfolio of work.
- HTML and/or PDF version of your resume.
- Music or movie review.
- Experimental hyperfiction or some new media art form.
- Short samples or excerpts of your fiction or poetry.
- A page of books you are reading.
- Widgets.
- TiddlyWiki.
- External links page to other websites.
This is not an all inclusive list. Use your imagination.
Requirements
In coming up with an orignial site theme which is appropriate for an Internet audience, consider also the following requirements:
- Create some personna/identity of you (the author/designer) online.
- Provide your name and some contact info.
- Demonstrate best practices for web design and writing as covered in this class.
- Have a unified site theme with a consistent and user-friendly navigation structure.
- Use some graphics such as photos, backgrounds, text replacement, etc.
- Include a link to your Mini Zen Project.
- Work well primarily in Mozilla and secondarily in IE.
- Include a design report.
Design Report
At the end of the project, you will write a design report which will be part of your website. It should be posted as HTML and use the theme for your site. This report should be in the range of 800-1200 words and should follow good practices of writing for the web.
The audience for your report should be potential site visitors interested in your site design. Imagine an employer looking to learn more about your website design skills or other web designers wanting to know how you went about your design. Treat this as a professional document for their consumption.
A good design report will
- Talk about how your site is rhetorically situated.
- Explain the choices for the different types of content you decided to include.
- Discuss your design strategies (e.g., CRAP, navigational structure, etc.).
- Give credit for graphics, code snippets, and any other inspiration borrowed from others.
- Incorporate best practices of writing for the web.
- Have a professional voice appropriate for discussing web design.
In writing this document, you should use the concepts and terminology from the readings and class discussion this semester to establish your ethos as a web designer.
Grading
Your work will be evaluated on the requirements set out in this document with the following distribution
| Drafts of Website for Workshop | 10% |
| Personal Website | 50% |
| Design Report | 40% |
Drafts for workshop do not need to be highly polished, almost finished pieces of work. But you should have something substantial posted so that others can offer you feedback and assistance in refining your site. If you know what content you want to create and haven't had a chance, prepare a placeholder page integrated into your navigation scheme which says what content will be added.
Expect that creativity of site theme design and content will be a factor in grading the final version of your Personal Website.