Mr. O'Connell's Technology Home Page

Paragraph Text Alignment Project

Even the best websites need ongoing maintenance, editing, reformatting and repair over the course of time. This project is part of this ongoing process.

For the purposes of this course, only two alignments are acceptable for paragraph text. You may either left align your paragraph text, or justify your paragraph text. It is not acceptable to center align your paragraph text. It is also not acceptable to right align your paragraph text. Take a look at the paragraph text for any book or magazine. You will rarely (if ever) find anything other than Left Aligned paragraphs or Justified paragraphs. For practice, see if you can identify the alignment format in this paragraph.

Four examples follow, written in Latin. Latin is used so you can concentrate on formatting instead of content. These examples illustrate the difference between the two acceptable alignment styles, and the two unacceptable alignment styles for paragraph text.

Left Alignment (acceptable):

Justified Alignment (acceptable):

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse augue neque, hendrerit eu egestas ut, gravida id ante. Curabitur vitae nibh nibh, malesuada viverra ipsum. Nunc ac mi quis felis porttitor varius ut in diam. Nunc mi eros, vulputate at pharetra vel, scelerisque vel tortor.

Center Alignment (unacceptable):

Right Alignment (unacceptable):

Process:

• Open Dreamweaver
• Open each page of your website
• Select the CSS Styles panel on the right hand side of the screen
• Click the All button.
• Double click the p tag in your CSS Styles panel
• On the left side of the dialog box, select Block
• Change the Text-align: to either left or justify.
• Click OK
• Select File<Save All
• Check the paragraph text on each page to confirm that your paragraph text is aligned correctly.
• If the alignment is still not correct, and you already created a CSS for your site:
  • Select each paragraph
  • Set the Format to Paragraph in the Properties panel at the bottom of your screen.
  • Confirm that you have done this for every paragraph for each page.
  • File<Save All
  • Once again, check the paragraph text on each page to confirm that your paragraph text is aligned correctly.

Evaluation

I will look at the paragraph text alignment on each of your pages. If there are paragraphs on every page and they consistently use one of the acceptable alignment formats for body text, you will earn a grade of 100. For every page that is missing a paragraph, you will lose ten points, and you will also have to go back and write the paragraphs. For every page that uses one of the unacceptable alignment formats for body text, you will lose ten points, and you will also have to go back and correct the alignment formatting. If you mix the two acceptable alignment formats for body text, you will loose 10 points, and you will also have to go back and correct the alignment formatting.

F.A.Q.

Q: I like center alignment for my paragraphs. Why can’t I use it?
A: You are welcome to use center alignment for paragraph text. You just can’t use it for any of the websites you create for this class.