During Week 1 through Week 7 of this course, you will be building a personal website on a topic of your choice

Instructions

General Instructions for your Website:

During Week 1 through Week 7 of this course, you will be building a personal website on a topic of your choice. Choose a topic about which you are both knowledgeable and enthusiastic, so that you will be able to easily write about the topic and share your knowledge of the topic through your website. During Week 1, you will create the home page of your website. Make sure that you write the content (the paragraphs of information about your topic) yourself. Do not copy content from other web pages. Your website should contain at least 4-6 paragraphs of information, arranged in a logical manner (using headings and sub-headings appropriately). During Week 2, you will add an external style sheet to your website. During Week 3 through Week 7, you will either add additional pages to your website or you will add new functionality to your home page, as directed in the instructions for each assignment.

You must write the code files by hand for all assignments in this class. A simple text editor, such as Notepad or Notepad++ will suffice (or TextEdit on the Mac). DO NOT use GUI editors, such as FrontPage, Dreamweaver, etc. You must write the code for your web pages yourself. If you are using a PC, it is strongly recommended that you download the free Notepad++ text editor because it contains extra features which assist with debugging, such as line numbering and color coding of different elements of syntax. Mac users should use the TextEdit text editor that comes with the Mac OS. However, if you are a Mac user, make sure you set TextEdit to use Plain Text by default. You can find instructions for this here.

Make sure all of your web pages comply with the HTML 5 standards and CSS standards. DO NOT use obsolete HTML elements and attributes from previous versions of HTML. By including the HTML 5 DOCTYPE declaration in your webpages, and validating all of your HTML files here, you can be sure that your code complies with HTML 5. Starting Week 2, your external style sheet (.css file) must pass validation at the W3C CSS Validation Service. Make sure you use the “Validate by File Upload” option (and NOT the “Validate by Direct Input” option), on both of these validators since this is the way your instructor will check your pages when grading your assignments.

The home page of your website must be named “LastFirstHomePage.html” where “Last” is your last name and “First” is your first name. For example, if your name is John Smith, you would name your home page file SmithJohnHomePage.html Starting with Week 2, you will also have a CSS file linked into every HTML page on your website. Name your CSS file “LastFirstStyleSheet.css” where “Last” is your last name and “First” is your first name. Your website must only have 1 CSS file and that file should be linked into all HTML pages on your website. Additional HTML pages created for your website (During Week 3 through Week 5) should be hyperlinked together through a navigation menu that appears on all pages of your website. Naming conventions for each additional page on your website will be included in each assignment description that requires a new HTML page.

Specific Instructions for Assignment 3:

For this assignment, you will add a second page to your website and create a navigation menu that links the two pages together.

1) You will create an “about” page for your website. This will be a second HTML page. Since the basic structure of an HTML file is the same for all pages, you can reuse some of the code from your home page (created in Assignment 1). Create a new HTML file in your text editor and name the file “about.html”. It should contain all of the same basic code that is in the head section of your home page. The body section should contain additional content. Your “about” page should contain information about your website and/or information about you including any applicable civic or cultural activities (the author of the website). You can move some of the content from your home page to your “about” page, if it would be more appropriate on this new page, or you can write new content for this new page (or a combination of some existing content and some new content). Save your new file and validate it using the HTML validator. Debug and fix any errors identified by the validator until your file passes validation.

2) Make sure the external CSS style sheet you created in Assignment 2 is linked into both your home page and your new “about” page with the tag in the head section of each file. Your website should only have 1 CSS file, and that same file should be linked into all HTML pages on your website.

3) Create a navigation menu for your website. Your navigation menu can be as simple as a list of links, or you can explore some more advanced ways of creating a navigation menu if you wish. Make sure your navigation menu appears on all pages of your website (i.e., your home page and your “about” page). Your navigation menu must appear at the top of each page. For this week, your menu (on each page of your website) must include a link to your Home page and your About page. In future weeks of this course, as you add more pages to your website, you will need to edit your navigation menu on each page of your website to add links to the new pages you add to your website. Hint: Sample code for a simple navigation menu can be found in the Week 3 module in the Content area. At a minimum, you must model your navigation menu after the example I gave you in the Content area (a menu with a link for your Home and About pages on the top of each page of your website). You can also find links there to more advanced examples, if you wish to experiment with them.

Validation Requirements:

Before submitting your web site:

Validate all HTML files here, using the “Validate by File Upload” option, and fix any errors that the validator identifies before submitting your web site for grading.
Validate your CSS file here, using the “Validate by File Upload” option, and fix any errors that the validator identifies before submitting your web site for grading.

Note: It is critical that you debug and fix ALL errors identified by these two code validators before submitting your assignments. Contact your instructor for assistance if you are having difficulty debugging and fixing your errors because it is imperative that your code files pass validation.

Submission Instructions: Create a zip file containing all files related to your web page (.html files, .css file, image files, and/or multimedia files). Make sure you maintain the necessary directory structure in your zip file so that your webpages will view correctly when unzipped. In other words, if your images are in a sub-folder on your computer, in relation to the folder containing your .html file, then you need to maintain that same directory structure in your zip file, too. Submit only the zip file for grading.

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The videos below will walk you through each of the steps of the assignment:

Week 3, Part 1: About Page:

Week 3, Part 2: Navigation Menus:

Rubric for Grading Assignment

Exemplary

Accomplished

Developing

Beginning

Points Available

Webpages (all HTML files) validate without errors here

Student effectively completed the assignment.

Student partially completed the assignment.

The student provided limited and meaningless substance completing the assignment.