Building Your Cabin

By now, you should have done some thinking about your class project.

Have you done an outline?

1. Title/name of site
2. Mission/intention/topic of site
3. Pages (you need five)
   a. Home page (index.html)
   b. A page focusing on something you want the reader to know or do, relative to your topic
   c. More in depth information or auxiliary possibilities (I am being purposefully vague)
   d. Associated ideas
   e. etc. Links to sites that support your thesis or illustrate something about your topic
   f. You can be very creative with pages...don't rely on any of my lists!
   g. Something about yourself, or the organization or company you are making a site about
4. For each page
   a. Links
   b. Navigation (between pages) ideas
   c. Images
   d. Text/content
5. For the site
   a. Color ideas (see http://kuler.adobe.com/ for some fun with color)
   b. A diagram of how your pages will link to each other
   c. A sketch of the home page or of a basic page layout...on paper in crayon or marker or colored pencil or in Photoshop or Fireworks or Illustrator or the program of your choice
   d. Ideas of how you want the type to look (fonts, sizes, colors, etc.)
   e. A diagram of file names and file structure (could be combined with b above)
   f. Features you would add if you knew how
       i. videos
       ii. rollovers
       iii. sound effects
       iv. visual effects

I hope you get the idea...do a lot of thinking before you start twiddling bits on Dreamweaver. You'll be happy you did.

Begin thinking about your website project

Portfolio Project: “A cabin, not a mansion”
Building a Simple Website Using Dreamweaver

All students are asked to produce a fully-functioning, portfolio-ready website using Dreamweaver as discussed in class. As you learn new elements of Dreamweaver, it is expected that you will apply them to your class project website. At the final class, we will share our class projects.

Topic: Choose a personal topic for your website. Examples could be a website about yourself or your family, a site promoting a specific event or business, a fan site, a special-interest site about a hobby or activity, instructions for making or doing something.
You will need at least a few paragraphs of written information to include on the site, as well as some photographs or graphics.

Basic Requirements: Your website must consist of five pages. Possible pages might be:

• About Yourself

• Contact Us

• Home/Welcome page

• Links

• Photo Gallery

• Site map

Dreamweaver Requirements: Your site must include the following Dreamweaver-generated elements. These are minimum requirements, and do not need to appear on every page.

• Cascading Style Sheets

• Form (need not be fully functional)

• Links, relative and absolute, and two external links

• Persistent navigation and consistent design*

• Rollovers

• Tables

• Template or library items

*Design/Navigation: All pages of your site should have a consistent design and persistent navigation (user interface) for your site to be considered complete.

Summary: By the time you have finished creating your website, you will have the skills to produce a fully-functioning website using Dreamweaver. You will have a good working knowledge of the Dreamweaver program and a good framework for learning to apply some of Dreamweaver’s more advanced features.