The Assignment

Overview

As a professional in your field, you will most likely want to maintain a personal web space of some sort so that others can find out about you and the work you do, be it for research purposes, giving speeches, seminars, or any other variety of things that bring you and your organization prestige. It is by no means a requirement that you tailor your site to look like a simple, professional space, but a little effort can go a long way.

While anyone experienced in web design should be able to complete this assignment just by reading the requirements below, we assume that most students have little to no experience in the area. In the spirit of that, we've provided the links above (labeled How to: HTML, How to: CSS, How to: Validation, and How to: SFTP) as a guide to help you through this assignment.

Minimum Requirements:

Your site must be hosted from Prism. Your homepage should be named index.html, but every other file can be named as you like.

index.html must include:

• An external style sheet (made in CSS) with the following:
  • Body Settings: A background image or color (not plain white)
  • Some basic text formatting (i.e. Font, Color, Size)
  • A header text class or header-like formatting
  • Link formatting
• Your GT Prism ID (i.e. gtg123a or gburdell3)
• A digital photograph of yourself
• A paragraph of text about yourself
• A clickable text link that leads to another site
• A clickable image link that leads to another site
• An email (mailto:) link that will send email to your gatech email address
• A link to your mailform page
• A table with at least 2 rows and 2 columns

You must also have a mailform page that allows viewers to send you an email via an HTML form.

Your mailform must:

• Actually send comments to your gatech email address
• Include at least 4 different types of inputs, such as text field, text area, select, radio button, and check boxes
• Have a "submit" and "reset" button
• Should link to a "Thank You" page or back to your index page after submitting it. (Making a "Thank You" page is optional however if you have one, it should include a link to your index page on it.)

Fancy Editors

You're not allowed to use them. You may not use any kind of HTML Generator or WYSIWYG editor. It's easy to tell who used one of these, and points will be subtracted accordingly.

Validation

We will NOT require your index.html, your mailform page, and your main css file (if you have multiple, clearly indicate which is the main one) to be validated. If you wish to, however, the requirement is only that HTML validate as XHTML Transitional 1.0 or HTML 4.0, and the CSS validate simply as CSS. You can read more about validating on the Validation page.

Compatibility

As a courtesy to your viewers, including your TA, who may be grading your website in a different browser or on a different system, please do not include Flash, embedded movies, embedded music, or Java applets on your homepage or mailform page. You are allowed to include these on any other page. If you want to use anything else advanced, you do so at your own risk. Make sure you understand whether it will break your page on some systems, and account for that. For example, some browsers will simply reduce the number of effects on the page if Javascript is turned off. Sometimes, however, it will prevent the viewer from accessing parts of your page. Your TA will grade your lab based on whether or not all of the requirements are easily accessible. TAs will grade in standards compliant browsers, so "it worked in Internet Exploder" will not be acceptable.

Additionally, no animated .gif files are allowed on your index.html or mailform pages. Though all modern browsers can render them just fine, they're really tacky.

Plagiarism, or "Admire and Acquire"

There is a lot of creative freedom in this assignment, and, in writing HTML, you can often obtain inspiration and code from viewing the source of existing pages. While this is allowed in this assignment, if you obtain more than a single line of code from a source other than these pages, please indicate this somewhere in your submission.

Georgia Tech Policy

Finally, all material posted on your site must be non-offensive and comply with the "Georgia Institute of Technology Computer and Network Usage Policy."