Assignment: Creating (and Coding) a Professional Website

(Note: If you have stumbled on this page by accident, this is an assignment I’ve given my English 5593 class. I’m posting it here because some colleagues are interested in seeing the assignment. –rb).

By April 14th, you will have created a professional website and an “off the grid” replication of that website, which will be built from the ground up and which will replicate as many of the features of your professional website as you are able to create.

The Professional Website:

Using WordPress, Weebly, or another free site, create a digital portfolio that allows future employers to find out who you are and what you do. At minimum, this site should have an “about me” page, a CV, and a description of working projects.

Here are a few examples of Professional Websites:

http://timorich.net/

http://ceball.com/

http://bonnielenorekyburz.com/

Process Material for the LRO:

• include any challenges you encountered when creating your professional site, as well as a description of how you met those challenges
• include a description of the ethos you are trying to project and how you believe this site projects that ethos
• include a description from someone else of your site’s ethos. Is there a difference between your perception and the perception of the outside observer? What do you make of these differences?

The Replication

Create a multiple page “website” (turned in on a jumpdrive, a CD, or hung up on the web somewhere) which has working links (internal and external) and CSS applied.

Process Materials for the Replication:

• keep a good record of roadblocks you experienced, how you got around them, and how you helped others
• reflect on the process overall and what each (the WordPress and the ground up) taught you about online style, editing, and persuasion

Assumptions:

This assignment has been written to meet the experience level of the majority of the class, who has little to no experience coding. We are assuming, then, that many of us are going to fail to fully replicate our professional websites. Unlike most assignments, then, failure is part of the point. What has the attempt to replicate something already on the web taught you about coding? What has it taught you about writing for the web? By keeping an accurate record of our thoughts along the way, you will be given a clearer sense of when to allow digital platforms to do coding work for you, when you should do the work yourself, and when you can and should copy code (giving proper credit to the original coders, of course.)

If you are in the small minority of people in this class who has experience coding, remember that in order to have something meaningful to write about for your LRO, you will need to push the boundaries of your experiments. What things have you not tried in your coding experience yet? What happened when you tried to apply those experiments to the replicated professional page?

Exercises Related to Editing Project 1

1. Using the basic terminology from Chapter 1 of Castro and Hyslop, see how many of the “Webpage Building Blocks” you can identify on the homepage of the professional website you created in WordPress, etc. To do so, you will need to look at the coding underneath your page by “viewing its source.” Annotate, in some way, the code of the site, labeling what makes up the “head” and “body” sections, what specifically is part of the “markup,” what specifically is a link to other content, and what specifically is textual content on the page. Don’t stress about getting this right (at this point, a great deal of this is going to look like goobledygook). The goal here is simply to see what you are able to identify and what you are not. Feel free to compare notes and ask others in the class.  (2/01/15)
2. Use Chapters 2 & 3 of Castro to “reverse engineer” your WordPress site. Start with the simple text of your site, then see if you can add headings, links, headers, and footers. (2/10/15). The same rules about stress from above apply. Our goal is to engage the process and keep a log of what happens throughout.
3. Use Chapter 4 of Castro to continue this process. Today, you might experiment with isolating a line of code from your WordPress site (or from somewhere else) and cutting and pasting it into your own site. What happened when you did that? What does the process teach you?  (2/12/15)
4. Use Chapters 5 & 6 to continue this process. As some of the code becomes more complicated, you might utilize some of the ready made work at htmlcssvqs.com. (2/17/2015)
5. Use the material about CSS to create a style sheet you apply to the HTML pages you have created. You might eventually experiment with CSS Zen Garden, in order to give your website different looks. (First mentioned 2/26/15)