I enjoyed looking at the drafts of your résumé pages in class yesterday, and I’m excited to see how they turn out. Some of you are ready to put the finishing touches on your résumé, while others may need to spend more time cleaning up your code. (The W3C Validator is a harsh master!) Don’t forget that the résumé assignment is due at the beginning of class next Thursday. Please review the assignment details before you submit your project, and don’t forget the final piece of the assignment: a one-page memo explaining and justifying the choices you made as worked on your résumé.
If you’re wondering how to focus your energies during the coming week, here are a few tips to ensure your success on the résumé project:
- We have spent a lot of time in class adding colors and typefaces to our stylesheets, so I’ll be looking for evidence that you know how to go beyond the default colors and fonts imposed by your browser.
- We haven’t spent as much time on CSS positioning (we’ll get there soon!), so I don’t expect to see incredibly complex page layouts. Your résumé doesn’t need to be complicated to be effective.
- Along the same lines, remember that you’re creating a professional résumé designed to be seen by potential employers. Yes, you should inject some of your personality into the design, but a résumé is not the best place to take big risks with an outlandish design.
- This first assignment is designed, in part, to see how well you’ve been paying attention to the readings in our textbook. Your code should be clean and well organized, and your XHTML and CSS should validate. (You’ll find links to the W3C validators in the new “Quick Links” sidebar on the right.)
- The assignment sheet is very specific about what you should name your files and where they should be located. Please follow these directions to the letter.
On Tuesday, we will begin with a few minutes of Q&A about the résumé assignment, so please come ready to ask any last-minute questions you might have. Afterwards, we’ll move on to bigger and better things—like finding, editing, and inserting images into web pages. Please read Hour 10 and Hour 11 in the Sams book before you come to class.
I know you’ll be finishing up your résumés, so we won’t have a reading assignment for Thursday. After you submit your résumé projects at the beginning of class, I will introduce our next assignment: the CSS Zen Garden redesign. If you’d like a sneak-peek of what you’ll be working on, you might want to peruse the CSS Zen Garden site before you come to class.