Today's Lab Exercises

Today you will create a basic "About Me" HTML page and style it with a bit of CSS:

  1. "About Me" Page
  2. Style Your Page with CSS
  3. Upload Your Page to the Web
  4. Advanced Style Techniques
  5. Definition Lists for Your Favorite Movie
  6. Decrementing ol

Exercise 1: "About Me" Page

(See example screenshot on the next slide).

Create a page aboutme.html that describes you. Include information such as:

Exercise 1 (Continued): Example

This example page describes textbook co-author Victoria Kirst. Look at the lecture slides about HTML to see examples of the right tags to use.

Exercise 1 (Continued): How to View Your Page

Cloud 9 has a really handy live preview feature that you can use to watch the results of your changes to HTML and CSS! To set up the preview feature, follow the screenshots on the slides below.

To view your page, click on the Preview tab in the top-right corner of the Cloud 9 Application and select "Live Preview File (aboutme.html)".

You should see the results of you HTML in a new tab, similar to the screenshot below.

Now you're set to make your page more style-tastic with CSS!

Exercise 2: CSS Styles (~15 min)

(See example screenshot on slide below)

Create a CSS style sheet named styleme.css to improve the appearance of your About Me page. You can find some CSS properties in the lecture slides or online.

Use a <link> tag to reference your CSS file in your HTML:

            
            <head>
              ...
              <link type="text/css" href="styleme.css" rel="stylesheet" />
              ...
            </head>
            
          

Exercise 2 (Continued): Adding CSS Styles

  1. Change the color of at least two elements
  2. Change the font properties (family, size, weight, or style) of at least two elements. Some standard fonts include Arial, Arial Black, Verdana, Trebuchet MS, Georgia, Tahoma, Courier New, and Times New Roman
  3. Change at least one other thing (e.g. background color, text alginment, etc.)

Exercise 2 (Continued): Example

Exercise 3: Turn in Your Page to GradeIt (~10 min)

There's still some more to do with your aboutme.html page, but let's try a test turnin to see your files live on a real webserver!

Note that the turnin only accepts an aboutme.html page -- this means that if your page links to other resources (like images) then you'll have to use absolute URLs to reference them in your aboutme.html page. Follow the directions on the slides below to turn in your code!

Exercise 3 (Continued): Transferring from Cloud 9 to GradeIt

  1. Download your aboutme.html file from cloud9 (use the 'File' menu)
  2. Save it someplace on your computer
  3. click here to open up the 'lab1' turnin page in GradeIt
  4. Select your aboutme.html from where you saved it on your local computer
  5. Fill out the rest of the form and turn it in
  6. In your turnin receipt page, you should see a link to your aboutme.html page. Click it, and see your page on webster!

Exercise 4: Advanced Styles (~10 min)

(See example screenshot on slide below)

If you complete the previous exercises, great job! You can add any extra content to your page that you like. Or, if you want a challenge, try to figure out how to add the following styles:

These are tricks not covered yet in class. Use Google or A CSS reference such as W3Schools.

Exercise 4: Example

These are snippets of Victoria's updated page, showing links and drop-caps:

Links: (hover is not shown)

Drop-caps:

Exercise 5: Favorite Movie

(See example screenshot on slide below)

Look up one of the favorite movies/shows from your About Me Page on imdb.com

In your page, reproduce some of the film's IMDB info in a nested list under that movie's bullet. You'll want to read through teh slides below to learn how to represent this information as a HTML definition list

Consider applying styles to your definition list to make it look snazzy

Exercise 5: Example

These are snippets of Victoria's updated page, showing a favorite movie:

Exercise 6: Decrementing ol

(See example screenshot on slide below)

Exercise 6: Example

These are snippets of Victoria's updated page with decremeting ol: decrementing ol example

If You Finish Them All...

If you finish all the exercises, you can add any other content or styles you like to your page.

If the lab is over or almost over, check with a TA and you may be able to be dismissed.

Once the lab time is up, you may stop working. You don't need to complete the remaining exercies unless you want to for fun.

Great work!