Homepage

Build a simple homepage using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Background

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:

  1. HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, which is used to describe the content of websites;
  2. CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, which is used to describe the aesthetics of websites; and
  3. 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.

Getting Started

Instructions for Harvard College students
  • Head to GitHub and, after signing in, accept this assignment on GitHub Classroom.
  • After about a minute, refresh the page and click the link to visit your personal GitHub Classroom assignment page.
  • On the assignment page, click the green Code button and choose Open with Codespaces.
  • Cilck New codespace and then, if prompted, Create codespace.
  • Once your Codespace loads, click the + button in the bottom section of your window (next to the word “bash”). You should then see blue text appear that says /workspaces/homepage-USERNAME (where USERNAME is your GitHub username).
    1. Execute ls. You should see this problem’s distribution, including index.html and styles.css.
    2. You can immediately start a server to view the site by running
$ http-server

in the terminal window and clicking the “Open in Browser” button that appears.

Instructions for non-Harvard College students

Here’s how to download this problem’s “distribution code” (i.e., starter code) into your own CS50 IDE. Log into CS50 IDE and then, in a terminal window, execute each of the below.

  1. Execute cd to ensure that you’re in ~/ (i.e., your home directory).
  2. Execute mkdir pset8 to make (i.e., create) a directory called pset8 in your home directory.
  3. Execute cd pset8 to change into (i.e., open) that directory.
  4. Execute wget http://cdn.cs50.net/2020/fall/psets/8/homepage/homepage.zip to download a (compressed) ZIP file with this problem’s distribution.
  5. Execute unzip homepage.zip to uncompress that file.
  6. Execute rm homepage.zip followed by yes or y to delete that ZIP file.
  7. Execute ls. You should see a directory called homepage, which was inside of that ZIP file.
  8. Execute cd homepage to change into that directory.
  9. Execute ls. You should see this problem’s distribution, including index.html and styles.css.
  10. 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.

Specification

Implement in your homepage directory a website that must:

  • Contain at least four different .html pages, at least one of which is index.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!

  • Integrate 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. In particular, you might find some of Bootstrap’s components of interest. To add Bootstrap to your site, it suffices to include

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@4.5.3/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" integrity="sha384-TX8t27EcRE3e/ihU7zmQxVncDAy5uIKz4rEkgIXeMed4M0jlfIDPvg6uqKI2xXr2" crossorigin="anonymous">
<script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.5.1.slim.min.js" integrity="sha384-DfXdz2htPH0lsSSs5nCTpuj/zy4C+OGpamoFVy38MVBnE+IbbVYUew+OrCXaRkfj" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@4.5.3/dist/js/bootstrap.bundle.min.js" integrity="sha384-ho+j7jyWK8fNQe+A12Hb8AhRq26LrZ/JpcUGGOn+Y7RsweNrtN/tE3MoK7ZeZDyx" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>

    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.

Testing

If you want to view how your site looks while you work on it, navigate to your homepage directory (remember how?) and then execute

```
$ http-server
```

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!

Assessment

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 this Markup Validation 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.

Afraid style50 does not support HTML files, and so it is incumbent upon you to indent and align your HTML tags cleanly. Know also that you can create an HTML comment with:

<!-- Comment goes here -->

but commenting your HTML code is not as imperative as it is when commenting code in, say, C or Python. You can also comment your CSS, in CSS files, with:

/* Comment goes here */

Hints

For fairly comprehensive guides on the languages introduced in this problem, check out these tutorials:

How to Submit

Instructions for Harvard College students

Harvard College students (those with an @college.harvard.edu email address) should submit this problem via GitHub, not via Gradescope.

In your Codespace, execute the below, replacing USERNAME with your actual GitHub username.

submit50 classroom50/homepage USERNAME
Instructions for non-Harvard College students
  1. Download a ZIP file of your website by control-clicking on your homepage folder in CS50 IDE’s file browser and choosing Download.
  2. Go to CS50’s Gradescope page.
  3. Click “Problem Set 8: Homepage”.
  4. Drag and drop your homepage.zip file to the area that says “Drag & Drop”.
  5. Click “Upload”.

You should see a message that says “Problem Set 8: Homepage submitted successfully!”