personal course home page project

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 you 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.

A Concept: Present Yourself as a "Round" Character

The central goal of your PCHP—beyond creating what for many of you will be your first Web page—is to arouse interest by presenting yourself as a unified but "round character," as opposed to a "flat character" or a diffuse non-character.

First conceived by novelist E.M. Forster, a

Flat character in fiction is one dimensional, and can be summed up simply in a single sentence, while a
Round character has multiple sides that imply a more fundamental, sometimes-unstated unity.
Diffuse characters (not Forester's term) are presented with so many sides or traits that they don't add up to the unified sense of a person.

These types of fictional characters suggest choices in conceiving your PCHP:

Flat PCHP: On a personal Web site like the PCHP, a flat-character style of presentation emphasizes only one interest, passion, personality trait, identity, aspiration, etc. Example: "I love Star Wars" or "I'm a typical college student." Such a site will come across as a Star Wars tribute site or a list of college cliches, rather than presenting a sense of the site's creator as an individual person. The site is strongly unified, but the person behind it appears obsessive and flat, as if his/her humanity has been consumed by the single theme.

Round PCHP: A round-character style of presentation features two or three topics that are intentionally selected to suggest an understanding about the person behind the site.

Diffuse PCHP: A site that includes all sorts of items or themes—for example, being an Engineering major, a snapshot from a Colorado vacation, snowmobiling in Northern Minnesota, loving Star Wars, picture of boy/girlfriend, top-ten list of best Minnesota golf courses—present such a diffuse sense of the person that the site feels like a grab-bag of topics which obscures rather than suggesting the person behind it.

What distinguishes a round character from a flat one isn't the number of traits or topics described, but how they seem to relate to one another.

Examples of round-character concepts in which different, even contradictory-seeming traits, relate to each other to create a unifying concept or story:

how Star Wars led me to become an Engineering major,
I was born and raised in Florida, but I love living in Northern Minnesota,
Twin Passions: Shoes and Aircraft, etc.
being a scholar and drinking coffee (see the preamble on Christian Sandvig's home page)

In creating this sense of yourself via a concept, you're not required to reveal anything private about yourself, or even tell the truth.

Concept as a Design Scheme

Not everything on your page needs mechanically to echo your concept, but the major design choices and elements (for instance, the banner, major image, preamble, colors, background images, etc.) should re-enforce and carry out your concept. These design elements should "talk to" one another, and thus serve together to realize a "scheme."

A strong, conceptual design scheme creates a clear enough center of gravity so that you can also include other, non-concept topics without making your site thematically diffuse.

The concept will thus determine the choices you'll make about the visual and verbal content, and how you present them.

The concept isn't all there is to you or your life—no page or site can sum up that—but it presents you from a particular angle that can make sense in a the limited time and space afforded by a Web page.

Preamble

A primary feature of your PCHP is an introductory statement or "preamble," that tells a story, or otherwise creates a voice, that presents your multi-dimensional concept and how the different topics relate to one another.

Do not automatically start your preamble with your name, major, and year. Your name will appear in the banner and the page title. Your major and year in school may not may not be part of your chosen concept. The preamble should hook us with an introduction to you focused by the concept, and not read like a list of general information on an application form.

Required Content: A Page-Design Challenge

In addition to expressing your concept in a unifying preamble and a set of design elements, the Personal Course Home Page should also include all the following kinds of items, in one form or another, in a coherent page design:

your name
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 concept.
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 concept, with links to related sites if possible.
other items, information, content or statements (many of which express your concept) and that you think might be helpful or interesting to your classmates with accompanying images.
Try at least one technique from the Dreamweaver book on this page that we haven't covered together in class. At the bottom of your page, include a note with the name and page number of the technique you tried.

What Makes This Project Interesting

This project gives you practice incorporating a variety of information like that above into a unified Web-page design that is both publicly useful and personally expressive.

Creatively, this assignment suggests that any Web page needs simultaneously to combine the contradictory virtues of unity and variety, which are brought together in a concept.

Criteria Checklist

You can download and print the checklist of criteria that I will use to evaluate your projects. Please note that this document is subject to change. Any substantive revisions or adjustments in the criteria will be announced in class.

Sample Pages (With "Round" Concepts)

Internet researcher Christian Sandvig's home page (work and coffee)
an "Applied Forces" page (engineering used to explain a life)
a Tale-of-Two-Cities page (life split between here and there)
an accounting-art-and-humor page (who says accounting majors aren't artistic and funny)

Key Terms

Web-site concept
aggregate vs. systematic space (Lev Manovitch)
design scheme
round, flat, and diffuse character-presentation styles
Visual Hierarchy