Build a simple homepage using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
The internet has enabled incredible things: we can use a search engine to research anything imaginable, communicate with friends and family members around the globe, play games, take courses, and so much more. But it turns out that nearly all pages we may visit are built on three core languages, each of which serves a slightly different purpose:
- HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, which is used to describe the content of websites;
- CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, which is used to describe the aesthetics of websites; and
- JavaScript, which is used to make websites interactive and dynamic.
Create a simple homepage that introduces yourself, your favorite hobby or extracurricular, or anything else of interest to you.
Here’s how to download this problem’s “distribution code” (i.e., starter code) into your own IDE. In a terminal window, execute each of the below.
- Execute
cd
to ensure that you’re in ~/ (i.e., your home directory). - Execute
mkdir pset8
to make (i.e., create) a directory called pset8 in your home directory. - Execute
cd pset8
to change into (i.e., open) that directory. - Execute
wget https://cdn.cs50.net/2019/fall/tracks/web/homepage/homepage.zip
to download a (compressed) ZIP file with this problem’s distribution. - Execute
unzip homepage.zip
to uncompress that file. - Execute
rm homepage.zip
followed by yes or y to delete that ZIP file. - Execute
ls
. You should see a directory calledhomepage
, which was inside of that ZIP file. - Execute
cd homepage
to change into that directory. - Execute
ls
. You should see this problem’s distribution, includingindex.html
andstyles.css
. - You can immediately start a server to view the site by running
$ http-server
in the terminal window and clicking on the link that appears.
Implement in your homepage
directory a website that must:
- Contain at least four different
.html
pages, at least one of which isindex.html
(the main page of your website), and it should be possible to get from any page on your website to any other page by following one or more hyperlinks. - Use at least ten (10) distinct HTML tags besides
<html>, <head>, <body>, and <title>
. Using some tag (e.g.,<p>
) multiple times still counts as just one (1) of those ten! I- ntegrate one or more features from Bootstrap into your site. Bootstrap is a popular library (that comes with lots of CSS classes and more) via which you can beautify your site. See Bootstrap’s documentation to get started. To add Bootstrap to your site, it suffices to include
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.3.1/css/bootstrap.min.css">
in your pages’ <head>
, below which you can also include
<link href="styles.css" rel="stylesheet">
to link your own CSS.
- Have at least one stylesheet file of your own creation,
styles.css
, which uses at least five (5) different CSS selectors (e.g. tag (example), class (.example), or ID (#example)), and within which you use a total of at least five (5) different CSS properties, such as font-size, or margin; and - Integrate one or more features of JavaScript into your site to make your site more interactive. For example, you can use JavaScript to add alerts, to have an effect at a recurring interval, or to add interactivity to buttons, dropdowns, or forms. Feel free to be creative!
- Ensure that your site looks nice on browsers both on mobile devices as well as laptops and desktops.
If you want to view how your site looks while you work on it, there are two options:
- Within IDE, navigate to your homepage directory (remember how?) and then execute
$ http-server
- Within IDE, right-click (or Ctrl+click, on a Mac) on the homepage directory in the file tree at left. From the options that appear, select Serve, which should open a new tab in your browser (it may take a second or two) with your site therein.
Recall also that by opening Developer Tools in Google Chrome, you can simulate visiting your page on a mobile device by clicking the phone-shaped icon to the left of Elements in the developer tools window, or, once the Developer Tools tab has already been opened, by typing Ctrl+Shift+M on a PC or Cmd+Shift+M on a Mac, rather than needing to visit your site on a mobile device separately!
No check50
for this assignment! Instead, your site’s correctness will be assessed based on whether you meet the requirements of the specification as outlined above, and whether your HTML is well-formed and valid. To ensure that your pages are, you can use the W3Schools HTML Validator service, copying and pasting your HTML directly into the provided text box. Take care to eliminate any warnings or errors suggested by the validator before submitting!
Consider also:
- whether the aesthetics of your site are such that it is intuitive and straightforward for a user to navigate;
- whether your CSS has been factored out into a separate CSS file(s); and -whether you have avoided repetition and redundancy by “cascading” style properties from parent tags.
For fairly comprehensive guides on the languages introduced in this problem, check out the documentation for each on W3Schools.
This project is the problem 8 of the Harvard CS50
course, Introduction to Computer Science.