This Digital Portfolio is a final project for a web publishing course in Sweetwater High School taught by a very helpful and respectful teacher known as Mr. Arturo Lopez. This web site shows all the skills students could learn about web designing and also shows the projects that could be accomplished by learning those skills.

My name is Jose Hurtado, a senior at Sweetwater High School, and I was interested in taking this class because web designing is a great career that everyone can have. The future holds many careers that require computer skills and I want to be able to understand computers from the inside out. Computers might seem complicated at first, but the truth is that technicians and engineers have created computers to make people's lives easier. I've always liked computers because you can practically do anything with them, and they help out a lot in everyday life. Computers can connect to the world wide web and to other computers as well. The Internet is an amazing thing because it has many answers and questions people might wonder about. Whenever I have a doubt about something or don't know how to do something, the world wide web will most likely have an answer or be able to show me how to do something.

The Web Publishing course at Sweetwater High School is a great class to take. It is designed to teach high school students web publishing and development skills. This course is thought by Mr. Lopez and based upon Southwestern Community College's Web Certification program. In this lecture-lab course, step-by-step instructions are given on how to create projects such as web pages using different pieces of software. ex: Macromedia Dreamweaver, Macromedia Fireworks, Microsoft Word, etc.

The basic programs students will start off with are: notepad, microsoft word, and paint. These are some programs that most of the time are already pre-installed on every up-to-date computer. The program that is for more advanced users is Macromedia Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is a software program that makes creating web sites an ease. It might look complicated at first sight, but when someone starts using it, they will find out that it makes creating web pages a breeze with enhanced and enriched features for amazing looking web pages. Another program used during the Web Publishing course is Macromedia Fireworks. It is a software that is used to enhance or modify images. With this software users can alter or change the look of images found on the world wide web or personal pictures.

In this course, we created several web pages with Macromedia Dreamweaver. The first project was "Intro to Dreamweaver" where we typed out what Dreamweaver was used for, and what it was capable of doing. Here we learned some basic features like HTML codes for web pages so that we could better understand how web pages are coded to be able to appear on different internet browsers.

Another web page we did was " SUHI Learning CSS Web Page". By doing this web page, we learned to use CSS rules in order to make creating web sites easier. CSS sheets can be used to put certain rules on different parts of a web page, like font, background, text color, borders, etc.

Another great-looking site that we, students,l got to create was "cafe Townsend", a site for a restaurant. This web page had the most things because it had flash video, moving banner, and best-looking all around. The feature that we didn't know at first was how to put a short video on web page, which turned out looking awesome and turned to be easier all thanks to Dreamweaver.

The most recent project we made, was a web page on an endangered species, which mine was " Arctic Wolf ". Mr. Lopez gave us the opportunity of choosing an endangered species from a list and we got to show and write about information about the animal all on web pages. We typed out why the animal was in the endangered species list, its habitat, population, behavior, and what was being done to protect the animal from going extinct. Here I learned how to do a navigation bar, and link on whichever word, and when clicked, went to another web page. Also I learned how to use tables and organize them so that web pages are easy to understand.

Overall, I am glad that I made the choice of picking Web Publishing course as a class on my senior year. I can definitely say that I learned a lot of things about Dreamweaver and how web sites are coded, and also how to make my own web pages. I never knew that regular people like me, could make web sites so that other people around the globe could see them too. I really enjoyed coming to this class because I love computers and computer are everywhere nowadays. This class made me think about future career opportunities that deal with computers and creating web sites. Most of the careers out there in the real world require computer skills, and by taking this class I learned a lot and now there could be a possibility that I might have a career with computers. My performance in this class, I think was good enough. There was some times where I didn't feel like doing web pages, but the truth is that I really like making them, because its your own web page and tells a lot about yourself. So far I think I put more of my work into this Digital Portfolio project because of how it looks.

Basically, I would recommend this class to anyone because there is going to be a career out there in which it will require computer skills, and in this class you'll learn those skills. Mr. Arturo Lopez teaches very well and is very helpful when a student needs some help or has a question.