projects

Website

Using Wix or another website platform of your choice, create a website on a topic or issue that you care about. Your website should target a specific audience to achieve a specific purpose or communicative goal.

As you’re choosing a topic, consider three possible categories:

  • a professional portfolio for a specific career that you want to pursue
  • an organization that you belong to or a business that you know about that needs a website or a redesign of their existing site
  • an issue that you care about and about which you want to inform, persuade, or otherwise communicate with a specific audience

We’ll go over these options in class. The website you create should be rhetorically effective, aesthetically appealing, easy to navigate, and professional in design. It should include well-written text and well-designed images along with interactivity and (optionally) other multimedia elements (e.g., video, audio).

Evaluation Criteria:

  • The content (text, images, other multimedia) is selected to achieve a specific purpose with your target audience.
  • The design contributes to the website’s effectiveness.
  • The content is well organized, with the most important information on the homepage and with clear navigation to other pages.
  • The written text follows best practices for effective web writing and style: most important information first; short paragraphs; headers to outline/organize content; engaging style.

Website Proposal

Write a proposal in which you describe the project you have in mind for the Website assignment. Use the categories indicated below, and refer to Elements of Rhetorical Situations for more detail about each of the categories.

  • General topic: Write a one-sentence statement of what your website will be about.
  • Audience: Who is your target audience? The more specific and narrow you can be here, the better. What background factors about this audience will affect how they receive your message? Do you have any secondary audiences?
  • Purpose: What do you want to accomplish with your website? What is your reason for communicating your content to your audience? Is there a particular attitude that will help you achieve this purpose?
  • Text (and other multimedia content): What content will you include? What media (e.g., images, video, audio) or genres will you use?
  • Resources: What resources will you draw on as you create content for your website? Provide the URL and a brief description of at least three specific resources that you’ll draw content from.
  • Models: What models do you have in mind for the design and organization of your website? Provide the URL and a brief description of at least three specific resources that you’ll use as models.

Keep in mind that you can change your plans and even change your topic as the quarter progresses. If you do change topics, please let me know and please write a proposal for the new topic.

Use Word or Google Docs for the proposal, and put it in the proposals folder in our class Google drive

Style Guide

Create a Style Guide for your website in which you describe the writing, typography, colors, and imagery that are appropriate for your site’s content, audience, and purpose. The Style Guide defines the site’s visual identity which should be consonant with the overall communicative goal of your website.

We’ll use Photopea (a free online photo editing program) for some parts of the Style Guide. You can use Canva to create your Style Guide. You can also use Adobe’s InDesign or another document design program; Google Slides or PowerPoint are also good alternatives.

Required elements:

  • front cover
  • website overview (content, audience, purpose)
  • writing
  • typography
  • color
  • imagery
  • final page

Front cover required elements:

  • Title of your project + “Style Guide”: for instance “UCSB Bucket List Style Guide” or “Style Guide for UCSB Bucket List”
  • Your Name
  • URL for the website
  • An image, pattern, design, or color(s) that evokes your intended style

Website overview required elements:

  • Concisely describe the topic, audience, and purpose of your website.
    • Optionally, add descriptions for secondary audiences and purposes.
  • Include the website’s URL.
  • Advice:
    • Don’t feel compelled to fill the entire page with text; use an image alongside the text, or allow for some white space.
    • Use columns rather than running the text from one side of the page to the other.

Writing section required elements:

  • In around 150-200 words, describe the style of writing that you will use at your website and address how this style is appropriate for the content, audience, and purpose of your website.
  • In this description, include the 3-5 adjectives that define the style of your website; these adjectives can be presented in a list, in complete sentences, scattered throughout the section, or in some other way.
  • Advice (same as above):
    • Don’t feel compelled to fill the entire page with text; use an image alongside the text, or allow for some white space.
    • Use columns rather than running the text from one side of the page to the other.

Typography section required elements:

  • Select the font for header and body text at your website
    • Optional third font for subheaders or flourishes
  • Provide the name of each font and the alphabet (upper and lower case) in each font
    • Optional numbers and glyphs for each font
  • Include a brief paragraph describing the characteristics of each font as they represent the intended style of your website
  • Optional elements:
    • Demonstration of each font in action (e.g., a header, subheader, and body paragraph)
    • Instructions on how to use each font (e.g., size, tracking, leading)

Color section required elements:

  • 5-7 colors, including a dark and a light for text/background, displayed somehow on the page
  • Include hex code, CMYK, and RGB for each color
  • Give each color a name that is relevant for your style
  • Include text describing the colors and the style they embody
  • Show the color in action (e.g., in photos, illustrations, moodboard), perhaps on a separate page

Imagery section required elements:

  • Present more than one image (photo, manipulated photo, illustration, pattern) that evokes the style of your website project
    • Optional: use a moodboard to organize your images
  • Include a brief textual description of the style of the images or the adjectives they represent

Final page required element:

  • A brief restatement of the major points of the style guide
  • An invitation to visit the website
  • An image, pattern, design, or color(s) that evokes your intended style

Website Outline

Create an outline that depicts the content, structure, and navigation of your website. The outline should show all of the pages you plan to include at your site, an overview of the content of those pages (images, text, anything else), and the navigation between the pages. Include a list of at least three other websites with content similar to yours.

The outline can be done by hand on paper (neatly!) or you can use an application (e.g., Canva, Figma, SmartDraw, Zen Flowchart) to create it. To represent the structure and navigation of your site, consider using an organizational chart; an org chart alone, though, might not provide the space for you to present the content of your site. So you could perhaps pair the org chart with a separate list of the content on each page and the list of similar websites.

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