Web Page Development Project

The Web Page Development Project

Task: Create your own web page, for your term paper project, and to use for other college and personal projects.

Using Xoom

This section describes the steps to follow to develop your web page, using a free service called Xoom. Xoom is free because they sell advertising and send advertisements to your email.

Step 1: Activate your E-mail

If you already have e-mail, you might skip this step, although you may want to create a special email for this class. If you do not have e-mail, then click to HoTMaiL which is a free e-mail service.

In order to get a free web page, you must have an E-mail account, because the password for your page is sent to your account.

Please try to use the same username and password for Hotmail and for Xoom. It is best to use all lower case letters. Step 2: Explore Xoom

Before you register for a particular address, you should explore Xoom to get a sense of what it is like. You can explore Xoom at the following site:

Xoom

Step 3: Register for a Home Page (Completed in Preliminary Exercise)

To register for a home page, you go to the Xoom site. Step 4: Check your E-mail

After a short time (this can be longer if Xoom is busy), check your E-mail and you will probably have received a message from Xoom containing your password and other instructions. Print out this message so that you can save the information.

Step 5: Create your Primary Home Page

You are likely to want to create more than one web page within your home at Xoom. Therefore, your primary page (called your "index" page) should be very simple, and should list links to the rest of your pages that you will eventually create. The following is a sample of the html code for this page:

<html> <body bgcolor="white"> <h2>Home Page</h2> <h3>Your name</h3> <hr> You could add a sentence of introductory material here if you want. <ul> <li><a href="http://members.xoom.com/MyMemberName/topic.html">Topic</a></td> <li><a href="http://members.xoom.com/MyMemberName/media.html">Media</a></td> <li><a href="http://members.xoom.com/MyMemberName/politics.html">Politics</a></td> <li><a href="http://members.xoom.com/MyMemberName/agencies.html">Agencies</a></td> <li><a href="http://members.xoom.com/MyMemberName/scholarship.html">Scholarship</a></td> </tr> </ul> <hr> <i>Your name</i><p> <i>date of last update</i> <center> <A HREF="http://www.xoom.com/"><IMG SRC="logo_edit1.gif" WIDTH=85 HEIGHT=30 BORDER=0 ALT="11MB Free Web Hosting at XOOM!"></A> </center> </html>

Note that the lines between

<center> and </center> at the bottom of the file must be included in all Xoom pages. and the file logo_edit1.gif must be uploaded into your directory. This creates a tag that acknowledges Xoom as the host of your site.

Step 7: Develop your Term Paper Your term paper will consist of five separate web pages:

topic.html This is a description of the policy topic selected by the student.
media.html How does the topic appear in as a public policy issue in the media, and in the popular and political culture?
politics.html How does the topic appear before policy making entities such as legislatures as they decide on policy responses?
agencies.html How are policies and programs implemented in public agencies?
scholarship.html What systematic evidence of results and achievements is available, based on research and evaluation studies?

If you created your home page using the model presented immediately above, then each of these files will be accessible from your home page. These specific file names are also the file names used in the "Virtual Conference" page. Thus, you are expected to literally use these file names.

The best approach is to write your paper off-line using a word processing program. When you reach a point where you want to begin to work on it as a web page, you can convert it to HTML if your word processing program does that, or save it to your clipboard Control-A Control-C and paste Control-V it into a basic text editor such as "notepad" that comes as a Windows utility. You can mark up the text for HTML using the following:

<p> feed a new paragraph <b> </b> bold font end bold font <hr> draw a line <h1> </h1> start and end a heading (smaller headings are <h2> through <h5>

8. Adding References to Web Pages to your paper

When you get to the part of your paper where you discuss web sites, you must create "hypertext links" in order to include them in your paper. A hypertext link takes the following format:

<a href="http://_______">_______</a> The first blank is for the address of the web site that you are linking to, and the second blank is for the title of the site that you are linking to. For example, the following link goes to John Jay College:

<a href="http://www.jjay.cuny.edu">John Jay College of Criminal Justice</a> You can include hypertext references as headings, or include them within sentences of your paper.

Xoom maintains a HelpCenter designed to help people who are developing web pages.