Welcome to my Digital Portfolio,

This page is my final project and my Digital Portfolio which is a compilation of my work displaying the knowledge, skills, accomplishments, interests, and academic growth obtained by having completed the Web Publishing Course taught by Mr. Lopez at Sweetwater High School.

My name is Melissa Gonzalez and I am a junior at Sweetwater High School. For this past semester I decided to set myself some academic goals and that is why I chose to take challenging courses as two AP classes and a Web Publishing Course. The Web Publishing Course seemed to offer me with the tools to broaden my options in the labor field.

I needed to become familiar with several programs that made the task of publishing a page on the web a little more easy. The programs that helped me through my learning process were the following: Macromedia Dreamweaver, Macromedia Fireworks, Paint, Angelfire.com, and Inspiration. Macromedia Dreamweaver is a program that generates codes for the beginning designers and allows them to attach CSS rules or "Cascading Style Sheets" to any page and improve the page's appearance. Macromedia Fireworks allows the designer to develop more elaborated visually appealing images. By using Paint the designer is able to modify an image's size by cropping it or select what part of the image he/she wants to appear in the actual web page. The web hosting service used to publish web sites on the internet for this course was angelfire.com Angelfire is a free web hosting service that allows beginners in the field of web design to practice their skills on web publishing. To conclude with the programs used in this course, I will talk about the Inspiration program. Inspiration allows web designers to layout the page they want to create and organize their thoughts and the information that will appear on the completed web page.

For this class I have completed the total of six projects which go from the simplest web page to a more complex, detailed web page. The first project I created consists of a list of my favorite bands and the links to their corresponding official web pages. Next, I followed my instructor Mr. Lopez while creating my chemistry web page. He provided me with the information needed to the successful completion of the web page in the class web page. Another project I realized is the sample web site which includes a list of my favorite bands, my current class schedule, and a list of my linked favorite web sites. The next project I created was the
Learning CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which was my fist time applying CSS rules into a document in order to enhance its appearance. Then, I created the Café Townsend web page, a web page aimed to satisfy the needs of a client. For the Cafe Townsend web page I borrowed information from Mr. Lopez and followed his instructions for developing the page successfully. Lastly, I created a web page based on an endangered species that most interested me and included the species' diverse information.

I think this class is a great opportunity to develop any student's computer skills and I strongly recommend students who are interested in technology to take this class. This class helped me improve my computer skills tremendously; now, I feel more comfortable while using a computer and actually feel I can teach something really interesting an helpful to my friends. When the time to go to a job interview comes I will have an interesting skill to talk about to my employer. After all the knowledge I obtained by taking this course, I am definitely thinking about a career in the computer field. Maybe it will not be my full time job but surely I will consider broadening my web publishing skills to have a more wide opportunity field. I thank my instructor Mr. Lopez for showing he is a flexible and understanding teacher by allowing his students to come to the class and get help on a project.