In this project,
you will create a single home page for yourself following the criteria explained below. Though you might later adapt this page to use as your actual home page, for now we will treat it as a specific class project, keeping it in the folder "www/4230/pchp".
Criterion 1: Visually Incorporate Lots of (Required) Content Gracefully.
Your first goal is to bring lots of varied material together on a single page, but to make it look uncluttered and unified.
- your name appearing prominently on the page
- an original banner that combines words and images that help realize your persona (see below)
- a "mailto" link containing your e-mail address
- a "tag line" appearing prominently on the page (Nielsen and Tahir 10)
- a deliberate color scheme at work in the design
- a menu of links to other (intended, imaginary) pages of your site. Such pages are not required or encouraged, and will not be evaluated for this project. Keep the focus of your work on the homepage!
- two or three items of recent news about you (accomplishments, trips you've taken, etc.) with relevant links if appropriate. These might serve as your required "decks" (see below).
- several links (somewhere on the page) with "decks" you have written (Nielsen and Tahir 27)
- several sections of the page covering major topics important to your persona and/or to your users. Each of these sections should contain sufficient content to merit being a section.
- several specific ways that the page enables your intended users to accomplish "high-priority tasks" (Nielsen and Tahir 10).
- a clear "visual hierarchy" in the design of the page: that is, the sections on this page should each have their own headings to distinguish them visually from one another. These headings might simply be formatted text, or could be images prepared in Photoshop. Consider how these various headings might visually and verbally unify the page by suggesting your persona and by referring to your banner, color scheme, and other visual elements.
- a separate section for links to your course exercises
- a "Top 5" or "Top 10" list of items that reflect your persona and/or your users' needs, with links to related sites or pages if possible.
Criterion 2: Present a Coherent—But Not One-Dimensional—Persona
You should choose and present the varied elements on the page not randomly as a grab-bag of images and words which are incidentally associated with you, but intentionally to suggest a coherent persona. The varied definitions of "persona" are helpful to consider: the outer personality or facade presented to others by an individual, an actor's portrayal of a character in a play, a "mask" (the Latin word from which the term derived), a social expression of a personality.
In other words, the material you choose for this page will suggest not just a purely public you (as on a resume), or a real, private, confessional you (not really possible anyway), but a Web-design equivalent of a sketch or caricature of you, specifically conceived for this project.
Your persona in this project, then, will be partly public, partly personal, partly real, partly fictional, and certainly very selective.
Not all of the material that appears on the page needs to monomanically express the persona, but enough of it should provide a conceptual container for everything else so your visitor comes away from the page with a specific notion of your persona.
Criterion 3: Design a Home Page that Knows Its Users and Enables their Tasks
While home pages are typically considered expressive playgrounds for presenting personae, I will ask you to apply Nielsen's idea of defining your "users" and designing the home page that enables them easily to perform their "high-priority tasks" (Nielsen and Tahir 10).
Fulfilling this criterion requires some translation and interpretation: that is, deciding just how to apply Nielsen and Tahir's advice about primarily business home pages to the different context of the personal home page.
Criterion 4: Make Good Use of Screen Real Estate and of Nielsen's Principles of Usability
We can never know how much of the page a user will see when it loads, or whether the user will do us the favor of scrolling "below the fold" (Nielsen and Tahir 23). That's why it's important to make good use of screen real estate, especially the most valuable property starting in the upper left corner of the page.
Homepage Usability also provides many (113!) specific pieces of advice about how to make your page more usable.
Criterion 5: Apply the Technical Skills We've Learned to Original Work
Here's where we have a chance to apply the tools and tricks we've learned to some original work of our own.
Some Samples (But Not Models!)
These pages were done using the more limiting, tables-based design technology, and following a different version of the assignment. (One of the former requirements, you might notice, was a paragraph-long "preamble" that verbally introduced the concept of the page. In this assignment, I am not asking you to include such a preamble, but to imply the concept using a combination of visual and verbal elements.)
Despite these differences, all three of the samples demonstrate how a coherent, but not one-dimensional, persona can be created on a home page:
- A Tale of Two Cities (Rick B.)
- Applied Forces...Trying to Achieve Equilibrium (Hal P.)
- (accounting, art, and humor) (Tristan T)