A Themed Page that Brings Together the Public and Personal You

For this assignment, you'll create a single Web page that will be your personal home page for this course. It will serve to introduce yourself to me and your classmates--both verbally and visually--and to 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. You may also use this page as your general, personal home page if you don't have one already.

In addition to an array of required items that I'll ask you to design into this page, the centerpiece of your PCHP is a "theme"--a unifying idea that brings together the personal and public aspects of your identity. The theme might be drawn from a passion of yours (a kind of music you play or listen to), your major (if that's an important part of your identity), a place (a Florida theme if that's where you're from or where you're determined to live, or snow as an icon of Minnesota), or a possession that emblematizes your life (your beloved 1982 VW van).

The theme will determine the choices you'll make about the visual and verbal content so the page isn't simply a grab bag of random items but a unified idea of you. A primary feature of your themed PCHP is an introductory statement that tells a story, or otherwise creates a voice, that brings together personal and public aspects of your identity.

The theme isn't all there is to you or your life--no page can sum up that--but presents you from a particular angle that can make sense in a small space and gives us a start in getting to know you.

Required Content

In addition to mingling the public and personal "you's" into a unifying statement and a set of design elements, the Personal Course Home Page should also include:

• your name
• your major and year
• a main image or graphic that expresses your theme, 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. At least some of these items should reflect your theme.
• 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 visually and verbally suggesting your chosen theme.
• 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).
• a "Top 5" or "Top 10" list of items that reflect your theme, with links to related sites if possible.
• other items, information, content or statements that express your theme and that 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

Creatively, this assignment suggests that any Web page needs to have some guiding idea or theme to express, visually and verbally, the identity behind it, whether it is a person, an organization, or a company.

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. Check out some student PCHP projects from last semester, including one featuring a Jane-Austen-theme, or a VW van, or peas. What other home pages can you find that use themes to present a coherent identity?