Deb DeFlorio dreams of becoming a scientist one day. Or maybe a mathematician. She hopes to reach that goal by getting into a top-ranked U.S. university to complete her studies. To that end, as a senior in high school, she maintains a high grade point average in all of her honors classes. She plays volleyball on her high school’s varsity squad, and she is a member of the Concert Choir, Chamber Choir and Show Choir, among her other extra-curricular activities.

But Deb has done something else that she hopes will give her the edge when applying to colleges next year and, perhaps, help her to secure scholarship aid. With her mother’s help, she’s designed and promoted a personal Web page touting her extra-curricular accomplishments ( http://pages.prodigy.net/jsdeflorio .) Her plan is to attract admissions departments to look at her Web site which contains a more in-depth profile than a black and white application or simple essay could do. Her home page bounces off the monitor screen in living color.

"We used Trellix 2 Desktop Web Publishing which came with our Corel Word Perfect Office 2000 Standard package to design the page," says Deb’s mom, Jane. "It provided ready-made templates to simply "plug in" information that got you started immediately. All the basics were there to get a page designed within the first hour."

The only downside of using a Web page publishing template program like Trellix 2 (or other Web publishing software--including Microsoft FrontPage 2000, and Adobe PageMill is that you have to use whatever basic designs they provide. So, if you want things like banners flashing across your Web page or backgrounds that change colors after several seconds and your software doesn’t support those extras, you will be unable to incorporate them using these types of programs only.

"If we wanted to make changes that weren’t directly addressed by the program, we had trouble fixing things," said Jane DeFlorio.

A basic knowledge of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) would help, but you have to know how to get into a software program in order to make changes to designs. But, she notes, "We didn’t spend days exploring the entire program because we wanted something usable fast."

Getting up and running with Trellix was fast for the DeFlorios. Deb’s basic page was uploaded the first day. Since then, she’s tweaked her page, adding more photographs and sports schedules that she hopes will be of interest to college admissions officers. She added some of these extras by using digital imaging.

For digital imaging (plugging regular photographs or copies of printed pages--like Deb’s many certificates of completion from extra-curricular programs--into your Web page design), the DeFlorios used an Epson Perfection 610 scanner and Picture Works Hotshots software which came with the unit. Most scanners come with software to allow usage, but, as with all software, "user friendly" is a highly subjective term. What seems intuitive to one can be confusing to someone else. Dozens of hardware/software packages exist, however; consumers can check them out at Epinions.com and see how regular consumers rate the different products. Still, the DeFlorios were able to scan photos, crop and adjust them for size and tone, and upload them to the Web page within a morning’s work.

To load her page onto her Web server, Deb used WS_FTP95, a freeware File Transfer Protocol program from Ipswitch which she downloaded from the Internet. (Another freeware FTP program is available from http://www.arachnoid.com .) Since her ISP (Internet Service Provider) allows her 6 MB of space for her page, she has plenty of room to continue adding to her page when she wants to. She didn’t go for the extra expense of securing a domain name, which runs about $35.00 per year, because she plans to inform college admissions directors personally about her Web page. She doesn’t expect colleges to look for her through search engines, so having a www.debdeflorio.com name for her site didn’t seem worth the expense right now.

So, designing and publishing the Web page was one thing. Getting college coaches and admissions departments to look at her site was another. Since so many universities are wired, though, Deb decided to contact them via e-mail. Her first contact--with the volleyball coach at Drexel University--resulted in a face-to-face appointment. Coach Melanie Kopka was impressed with Deb’s site and was happy to give her time based upon what she saw. Her comment via email? "What a great Web page--very informative!" This was the kind of encouragement Deb liked to hear.

Deb has also gotten positive feedback from Tina Creason, the volleyball coach at West Chester University, whose reply was, "Deb, Excellent job!" And a response from Cornell’s Coach Christie Jackson alluded to Deb’s current volleyball schedule, which is posted on the site.

Deb’s mother was happy to give her daughter all the aid she could on building the Web site to help her reach her goal. Having one child already in college with Deb a close second at his heels makes getting a financial scholarship all that more desirable for the DeFlorio family. They hope the Internet will help. She’s got a good head start with her own personal Web page.

So, if touting her extra-curricular activities on her Internet site helps in any way, Deb’s plan will have worked.

Photo courtesy Jane S. DeFlorio