Assignment 3 - Homepage (20 pts) Due: on or before Monday Oct 15th at 11:59pm.

Your assignment is to create and post a web site. Your web site must contain, at the very least, the following: A homepage called index.html. The index page should have: o a title (which is visible at the top of the web browser when your page is viewed), o some kind of greeting or heading (for instance, Welcome to my home on the Web, or Greetings from Pats Virtual World), o at least one paragraph of content (text), o at least one image file, o at list one link to outside content, and o a hyperlink that links to your content page. While we actively encourage you to devote some time to adding interesting content, this is not required. A second web page that contains some kind of substantive content (approximately half a page to a page) of your choice. What you put on this page is completely up to you. It could be a personal history, a tribute to your favorite band, a description of your favorite place in New York, an analysis of the main revenue streams for the national economy of Tuvalu, or anything else along these lines. If you simply do not feel up to posting a content page, you could create a resume page instead. Feel free to create as many other pages as you want. It is generally a good idea (though not required) to limit the number of pages to four or five (no more than 10, for sure), and to focus on making these pages really good. If you create multiple pages, it is a good idea to have consistent inter-page links across all pages.

Guidelines and suggestions

Many of you will want to add images to your homepage the judicious use of graphics can often make a web site more appealing. Remember, however, that it is generally not a good idea to randomly download and post images from other web sites graphic art is intellectual property. Here are some links to sources of images that you can legally use on your web site: Barry's Clip Art, Free Clip Images, and Free Clip Art. Good shareware for modifying image files

includes ThumbsPlus and Irfanview. You could also use Microsoft Paint Brush or Microsoft Photo

Editor to crop and create light .gif or .jpg files of photographs. Make sure that the images you post are not too big so that they do not take too much time to load.
Creativity when designing your webpage is encouraged. Feel free to add sound clips, Java applets, movies, and Flash animations. You can find guidelines and resources for creating more elaborate web sites at WebMonkey (from Wired Magazine), Keith Instones http://usableweb.com/, and Jakob Neilsen's UseIt website. We recommend Kompozer. However, feel free to use other authoring software that you might prefer. Examples of other web authoring software include Macromedia Dreamweaver and iWeb. Some useful links from NYU IT folks, if you choose to use a different web authoring software: o Guide to Macromedia Dreamweaver MX: Basic guide Advanced guide o Other how-to guides from Stern IT o Create an NYU home page o Edit your NYU home page o Other questions about NYU personal web page

Checklist and grading

First, follow the instructions about making your web page public on Create an NYU home page. Then, check your web site http://files.nyu.edu/~yourNetID/public/, to make sure that the default page is there. If you get an error message, check the list of possible errors at Other questions about NYU personal web page . If the problem persists, contact NYU ITS Client Services at 212-998-3333.

Try publishing something (a blank page, or a page with a couple of words) on the web server soon after you get started on the assignment, to make sure the publishing process works for you. In the Blackboard site for the recitation sessions, you can find a very detailed guide on how to create your first home page. After creating your web site, make sure you remember to upload your pages to the web server, and to check your web site from a browser other than the one on your computer (or have a friend do it). Make sure that all your links to other pages of your website work, and that you can see all the images, without any broken links. Make sure that you have uploaded to the server all the files associated with your web site: index.html, page2.html, resume.html (if applicable), all other html files, and all image files. Unlike our Windows clients, the web server uses the Unix operating system, which is cAsE seNsitive, and which sometimes reacts unfavorably to file names with spaces. It is therefore a good idea to use all lower case filenames, and not to use spaces in your file names. If you are using FrontPage to design your web pages, check that the file name is index.html and not index.htm Microsofts default file naming. Make sure you avoid the following other reasons why students sometimes do not get full credit for this work: Your index.html page has trivial content that clearly indicates that you have not spent any time working on the assignment. For instance, if your site simply says Hi, heres a link to my second page, do not expect to get full credit, even if the link works. Your page2.html page simply consists of sentences copied and pasted from other web sites, or your resume page does not look like a resume. Your text is hard to read due to a poor choice of colors and font size Your content is offensive or irresponsible, and/or your web site has pages that link to sites with objectionable material. This is extremely important. Use good judgment here.