Personal Home Site Project

A. The project itself

The design of a personal home site must answer a problem: walking around in the world, you have many selves, depending on where you are and who you're with, but on a personal Web site you're everywhere at once and with anybody who might visit your site, day or night.

In this project, you will create a personal home page that uses the techniques of Web design and "New Media Writing" to find, represent and connect the multiple identities you've developed. We all have these multiple identities because, in life, we've constantly been called upon to define ourselves in different contexts:

1. with our families (both blood relatives or more provisional, chosen families, e.g., the street),
2. in school (K-12, providing you with literacy and cultural authority),
3. in our profession or discipline,
4. and in relation to the entertainment industry (or other cultural institutions, e.g., the church).

These identities are always, at once, flowing from the past and being maintained and reinvented at the moment.

If we were working in print, you would describe and organize the relations among these selves and these contexts in an autobiography, which would use the techniques of narrative, retrospective analysis, literary point of view and verbal argument to show all these selves as a coherent story.

In this Web-based project, however, you will need to use hyperlinks, images, text, visual themes, etc. to suggest the connections among these identities (1-4 above) in a non-narrative way. By doing so, you'll be answering the challenge-common to many civic or commercial Web sites as well-of needing to speak simultaneously to multiple and divergent audiences without confusing or alienating any one of them.

Though you may compose many specialized pages and sites to represent you in getting a job, organizing a club, or tracing a family history, this personal home page is the hub that connects the various yous without entirely erasing the differences, since it's these tensions and contrasts that make us worth getting to know.

B. Self Commentary

This is your chance to explain to me, your professor, the many ways that your Web site demonstrates your grasp of the ideas and techniques we've been talking about so far, as well as your natural and profound degree of sensitivity and insight.

Write a three-page (double-spaced) commentary on your home site project. Try to specify and reflect on the principles or techniques of rhetoric and design you used. Claim credit for anything you see, even retrospectively, whether you were aware of using technique in your process or not. In this sense, your commentary may be partly a work of fiction, but, like all good fictions, it should lie convincingly to tell a greater truth.

Use and underline terms and ideas from Nielsen and the other readings to describe these principles and techniques (you might even use these terms as the headings of sections within the commentary). If you use terms from other classes you've had, underline them as well, and define them in a glossary at the end of the commentary.

Be sure to mention and describe any models of good design or writing that you kept in mind as you worked on your site. If you have questions or point of concern that you'd like me to ask your classmates to address during the workshop, please include these questions at the end of the commentary.