The First Webpage Design
Valerie Chu
LeMoyne-Owen College, 807 Walker Avenue, Memphis, TN  38126
(901) 435-1378
valerie_chu@loc.edu

PowerPoint Presentation
Full assignment description
Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007
Frame Page
Text Formatting
Hyperlinks
Upload Files
Completed Assignments in Fall 2010

The experience of accessing individual student personal web pages via the Internet is an important course objective of Introduction to Micro Computers.  The purpose of the proposed assignment is to lead students through the experience of creating web pages which are publicly accessible from the Internet.  From this assignment, students learn how to design a frame page with two columns, create an index page, produce images via peripheral devices, arrange materials by tables, and embed internal and external hyperlinks into web pages.  Through the final step of uploading files to a server, students learn about client-server relationship.  The assignment also demonstrates how directory tree structure files are transferred from a local PC to a server via the communication program SSH Secure Shell.

The course Introduction to Micro Computers emphasizes how software programs can be applied to real-life tasks.  Instead of teaching the HTML language, the course relies on the software program Microsoft Expression Web to complete the assignment.  The Expression Web program facilitates the procedure of arranging web page materials via a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) interface.  The procedure utilizes an existing frame page template provided by Expression Web to organize a web-site. 

One of the advantages of this assignment is that it reinforces the learning objectives of word processing which was covered immediately before the webpage design assignment.  For example, students can create tables without borders in order to line up a list of items.  They can apply word formatting skills to a web page environment.  Moreover, students are expected to use a scanner or a camera to create images, which are ready to be inserted into a web page document.

This assignment is also very flexible to suit individual students’ preferences.  Many students spend extra efforts on their own Web sites to impress their peers.  The suggested items on a Web site include, but are not limited to, an index page, a welcome page, a class schedule, a resume, a family page, and a friends page.  Although their Web sites are static, this assignment fully utilizes the concepts of internal and external hyperlinks to link to the students’ own pages and other people’s sites.

The assignment does not require the purchase of additional hardware devices.  Any used desktop computer can be set up as a server to store student web pages.  The server installed for my class is a used Dell computer (Pentium 4 CPU, 3.40GHz, 1GB memory, 160GB hard disk) using Ubuntu Linux 10.04 operating system.