C1 · Week 2: Forgotten web
The opening build: a simple text-first site you can ship on day one.
create a simple site — and give it a look the modern web has forgotten (GeoCities, brutalism, teletext, your call)
What the site is about is entirely up to you: your record collection, a manifesto, a shrine to some niche obsession. The look is the brief, not the content. Keep it dead simple, because it’s the first crit. Pure HTML/CSS, deployed straight to GitHub Pages. Bring the running site to the studio crit and walk us through how you built it.
This is also the first thing due in the course. The prototype freezes at the cutoff before your week 2 session, so week 1 is for getting your environment set up and getting a first page live. Stuck? Ask on Ed.
The first two crits pair up. This week the content is yours and the look is the brief; in C2 it swaps over: you take a real organisation’s content, and serving it well becomes the brief.
The spec
The brief on this page poses the problem and leaves room for your response. The spec is the fixed contract: what your tutor considers when judging whether that response meets the requirements. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for human judgement.
- deployed and live at its public GitHub Pages URL by the cutoff
- it is a real site — a handful of pages of readable content, each reachable from the home page
- the look commits to a web era the modern web has forgotten
- built with plain HTML and CSS, no JavaScript
- the starter's invariant checks pass — the basics any good website owes its reader
- the repo shows the process — commits that grew with the work, a process overview in PROCESS.md, and the week's reflection in reflections/crit-1.md
- you can account for how you directed, grounded and corrected the agent