General Information

These portfolios represent for each student the work of the full school-year in the digital-arts/web-design class. Content on the pages is the work they did throughout the year. The portfolio includes work from every technology they studied.

This web-design course is part of the Information Technology Academy (ITA) at Kennedy High. It is usually the first course in a three year curriculum which additionally includes computer networking and an advanced course in either computer networking or web-design.

The class is entry level. It is generally taught to tenth graders, with a sprinkling of juniors and seniors.

While viewing the portfolios, be sure to click around on the buttons on the pages. In the upper left section of the portfolio pages, the colorful image is actually a Flash slideshow. Click on the buttons inside the slideshow to navigate within it. See what happens.

The slideshow topic is Security vs Privacy. The Security vs Privacy project was done in collaboration with the Enlish department within the ITA. Text was not allowed on the images yet the slideshow had to communicate the topic. Research, reading and paper writing on the was done in the English class.

Press the buttons that form a horizontal row about an inch from the top of the screen. Wow! While it looks like fun and games, it is---and it is very sophisticated technology.

In today's highly competitive employment market, web-design skill is required for almost every office job, especially the "starter" jobs. These students are ready. After looking at their portfolios, you'll see why.

Technical Information

The tools they used include Photoshop, Flash, XHTML and Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) using Dreamweaver.

The XHTML and CSS were created for the most part in the "code" view of Dreamweaver. However for specific projects such as placing Flash content on a page, Dreamweaver's convenient dialogs were used.

Page layout was done entirely using div tags and CSS. No tables or templates were used. Instead, each student followed a specification which included a hand drawing of the layout and the names of the divs to be used. Within the specification, details on the width of the divs were provided and they were told when to float or center the individual divs. Absolute positioning was not used.

Center tags were not allowed; all centering of divs was done by defining div widths and using the "margin auto" technique from the stylesheet.

From the specification each student made her/his own stylesheet and XHTML page.

Each student created the banner ad on the right side of their page using Flash. Clicking on that ad takes you to an Adobe Acrobat version of her/his resume.