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ENGW 3332: Writing Online

Week 2 Workshop

Hi, Class,

Due to an unavoidable scheduling conflict, I am not able to be on campus today. I am leaving you in the capable hands of Dr. Hoover, who will be able to answer technical questions as you work through some specific tasks related to the online résumé assignment. Before you leave class today, you should have a fully “marked-up” version of your résumé, and you should be making progress on the visual appearance of your résumé and homepage, so please use your time wisely during this class session!

Thanks,

Quinn

PS — I know the first few class periods have been odd, thanks to guest teachers and my absence, but I promise things will get back to normal on Thursday.

Task 1: Analyze Online Résumés (Spend 25–30 minutes on this)

Arrange yourselves into groups of 2 or 3 students, and working with your team, open the following résumés in new tabs in your browser:

Evaluate each résumé using the following criteria:

  • First Impression — Can you immediately tell that this is a résumé? Does it strike you as professional and polished?
  • Content — Does it contain all of the “standard” components of a résumé? Is anything missing?
  • Organization — Is the content logically separated into various sections? Do the section headings stand out from the rest of the document? How easy is it to navigate between the sections?
  • Visual Design — Does the résumé have a distinctive style? Are fonts and colors used effectively and consistently throughout the document?
  • Code — Click on “view source” to look at the HTML formatting. Is each element surrounded by HTML tags? Is the HTML markup consistent and well organized?

When you are done evaluating the résumés, come to a consensus with your group about which résumé is best, and which résumé is worst. Be prepared to explain your decisions to the rest of the class.

When all groups have selected a best and worst résumé, take turns presenting your findings to the rest of the class. (Use the projector at the front of the room to display the résumés you are critiquing.) Can the entire class come to a consensus about what factors make a successful HTML résumé? Can you come to a consensus about things you shouldn’t do to your résumés?

Task 2: Finish Marking Up Your Résumé (Spend 30-45 minutes on this)

Work your way through the following steps, skipping the ones you have already completed:

  1. Copy your project folder to the Desktop. At this point, we have worked in two different folders during our class exercises (one on Day 1, and one on Day 2), so you should consolidate all of the files related to your résumé project into a single folder. The contents of this folder will ultimately be copied to your “public_html” directory on the EdShare server. Your project folder should contain at least three files: index.html, resume.html, and styles.css
  2. Make sure that your three files contain the appropriate content. Your index.html file should contain a welcome message for new visitors to your site, your resume.html file should contain the résumé that you started marking up in class on Thursday, and your styles.css file should contain any style declarations that you created in class on Thursday.
  3. Add the appropriate DTD to the first few lines of your index.html and resume.html files. Open each file in TextWrangler and paste the “XHTML 1.0 Transitional” DTD contained on the Code Bank page of our class website.
  4. Make sure that your index.html and resume.html files both link to your styles.css file. (Use the line contained under “Linking to an External Style Sheet” on the Code Bank page.) Test your site in a browser to make sure that the styles contained in your styles.css file are affecting both HTML pages.
  5. Working in TextWrangler, mark up your resume.html file using the basic HTML elements we discussed last week: <h1> through <h6> for headings; <p> for paragraphs; <ul> and <li> for bulleted lists; <ol> and <li> for numbered lists; etc… Every piece of text in your résumé should be enclosed in HTML tags.
  6. Think about the strategies you can use to emphasize certain pieces of text in your résumé. Experiment with <em> for emphasis (italics) and <strong> for heavy emphasis (bold). If you plan to use colors to set off certain words, enclose them in <div> tags, like this: <div class=”jobtitle”>.
  7. When you are confident that your resume.html file is fully marked up, upload your file to the W3C Validator to check for any errors. If you find errors in your markup, correct them and upload your file again. Keep doing this until you get this message: “This document was successfully checked as XHTML 1.0 Transitional!”

Task 3: Develop Your Welcome Page (Complete if time allows)

If you complete Tasks 1 and 2 before class ends (I don’t expect that many of you will), begin working on the content of your index.html page. Remember, this page is designed to be the “landing page” for your website; it is the page that will automatically load when new visitors come to your site. Think about what you want it to say. Should it be strictly professional? Or a little more casual? Do you want to include a picture of yourself? If not, what type of image(s) could you add to the page to improve its visual appearance?

Spend the rest of class working to develop the text and/or images for your welcome page. If you don’t get to this task, you can work on these items as you complete your homework for Thursday (Hours 5 and 6 in the Sams book).