Assignment Page
You will create a Web page that is meant to inspire and facilitate some kind of physical action from the online audience.

This target action should entail more than simply clicking, navigating, and skimming web pages. It should require the visitor to perform an action that has consequence in the physical world.

• to attend an event,
• to buy something,
• to print and read something,
• to donate money,
• to write an email,
• to add his or her name to an online petition,
• to sign up for a service
• to participate in a collaborative online project (that might entail physically collecting, posting, creating, or writing some kind of material)
  

If this project is created for an individual, club, or business who has an existing web site, you should make this project a companion site or sub-site to the original, and consider to what extent you want or need to make your project echo its visual styles.

Beyond Knowledge Space
If the action is accomplished through online means (such as filling out a form), it should involve providing information or original material from phystical space. The action may also sometimes require a series of steps or sub-actions, but these steps should also result in a clearly defined, single action.

Target Action
Tthe Action Project should be focused: everything you include (and how it is presented) should serve a specific, clearly defined goal: to inform, motivate, and enable your intended audience to perform one specific action or sequence of actions.

Usability, Visual Hierarchy, and Screen Real Estate
In class, we will discuss principles of usability and home-page design from the Nielsen and Tahir book, and of Visual Hierarchy and Screen Real Estate. Your project should reflect a thorough understanding of both the details and the philosophy of these principles.

Commentary
Write and turn in a 500-word commentary following the standard guidelines, using MLA citation and documentation format. Your commentary should also

1. clearly define why you created the site, on whose behalf (if not just yourself), and for what intended audience
2. explicitly specify the action that is your target, and why that action matters
3. quote, correctly cite, and discuss two principles of usability from the Nielsen/Tahir book and how you employ them in your project to achieve your target goal of precipitation an action.
   
   

Criteria

1. Purpose of page focused on enabling and motivating a specific, meaningful action involving physical identity
2. Clarity and unity of how the call for action is presented
3. Rhetoric of the presentation (means of persuasion, motivation, audience)
4. Usability, Visual Hierarchy, Screen Real Estate in design
5. Functionality of Page; Use of HTML and CSS; optimizing of images for quick download speeds, etc.
6. Completeness, thoughtfulness, correctness of the commentary (worth x2)
   
   

Resources

• Usability Touchstone
• Implementation
  
• Aristotle: "Rhetoric is the faculty of observing, in any given case, the available means of persuasion."
• Visual hierarchy and screen real estate
• Protesters Look for Ways to Feed the Web (NYT) (relation of digital and physical)
• Bad Boys Bail Bond (tag lines)
• Personas and Scenarios