Professional site design

You will be designing a professional-looking Web site that you could present to future employers. This means that your new Web site will consist of many things, but not: pictures of you and your friends, sports team logos, bland descriptions of yourself, pictures of UT, etc. In short, anything that you think is not resume-type material will not be on the page. It can, however, include: a brief professional bio of yourself and your interests, a copy of your resume, and detailed discussion of your skills in the related area -- anything you think an employer would be interested in reading.

The layout you decide on will be used throughout the whole of the site: the portfolio, and any other pages you wish to include. Your Portfolio, however, may have a different layout if you'd like. I suggest going through a similar, but not as extensive, design process as you did not Project 1: draw a pencil sketch, create a line-sketch using Photoshop, etc. Then, if you so choose, you can use InkNoise's Layout-o-matic to help design the basic layout structure.

Specifics

  • change the name of your old "index.html" page to "index-old.html" and then name the CSS-designed page "index.html"
  • place your stylesheet in a "styles" folder and all images in an "images" folder (this includes all images from your portfolio)
  • place all portfolio-related pages in a "portfolio" folder
  • the site must be designed using CSS and XHTML; do not use deprecated HTML tags
  • meets Section 508 accessibility standards
  • validates as acceptible CSS and XHTML; provide links stating as such in the footer
  • create at least two images, one of which will be a banner (an image, in this case, is not just a cropped photo, nor is it an image with just text)
  • at least one of your images should be created using the techniques found at or through http://www.spoono.com/
  • in your list of links, provide links to the main CSS designer blogs you are reading to learn more about CSS and Web Standards (there should be 5 blogger links, two of which can be from the list of links on the course site)
  • the front page content should have information about you that a potential employer might be interested in reading
  • if you use InkNoise's Layout-o-matic, the layout of the page should be altered in some interesting ways (i.e. adding a new div section -- simply changing color and border size will not be enough).
  • all HTML pages must use an .html extension, not .htm

If you are planning to create a portfolio for a field other than Web design or one of the many arts (visual, photographic, digital, etc.), please see the instructor so you can work out assignment specifics that fit your needs.