These guidelines are provided as general directions for how to prepare a hypertext presentation or paper for all my courses, and so are not specific to the particular project you are working on.  Please refer to the specifics of your assignment before you begin. 

The important thing to remember about the evaluation of a hypertext is that I consider first and foremost the content of your site.  While your organziation will be different--your material won't now be presented in a linear fashion, as a paper that begins on page one and moves page by page to the conclusion--the project will still need the strong critical and argumentative focus that you have worked to develop in your traditional papers.  I will evaluate other areas of the hypertext, like ease of movement through the site, organization, overall presentation, but your focus should always be on your ideas first.

Don't just make a page that has your paper pasted into it.  If you're going to complete a hypertext project, you need to take advantage of flexibility of hypertext, and use the possibilities that linking will provide, particularly to emphasize the connections between works.  Nevertheless, your site should still meet the length requirements for the assignment, although your text will be dispersed through the site.  You may exceed the maximum word count if you need to.  A word of advice here:  I would write the text sections of my paper in a word processor, which will allow you to spell check and revise much more easily than if you work on those sections in Dreamweaver, Composer, or Front Page.

Instead of the traditional methods you've used for organization, you'll now need to consider how to best organize a text that probably won't be read from beginning to end, but instead by moving back and forth through your links.  The best means to think about this at the beginning of your development stage is to consider what you want your home page to be--this'll be the spot readers return to when they get lost.  The home page should provide an overview of the project, and a guide for how to navigate the site.  As you write, you'll also need to consider that readers approach a hypertext differently than they do a traditional paper.  As a rule, my pages aren't a good example for how to do a hypertext--they're pretty boring and linear, alas.

By all means use pictures and other multimedia elements available on the web, but don't overuse them.  Blinking title pages are much more likely to distract a reader than add to your content, and many large picture files will simply make the pages slow to load (which means a reader might opt out of looking at your site!).

When you use pictures and other information that are freely available in the public domain, it's still important that you give credit to the source of your information.  If you lift a picture from a site to use on your page, link that picture back to the original site.  You'll also need a credit page, distinct from your works cited page, that gives the original location of all such materials.  If you want to use material that's copyrighted, please review the site's policies on such matters to be sure that's acceptable, and you've met all the requirements if it is.  Stanford University has more than you'll ever want to know about copyright regulations, but their site, Copyright and Fair Use, is a good place to start.  Regardless of whether your images are copyrighted, and you've been granted permission to use them, or whether they're in the public domain, you need to include a page titled something like "About the images used in this site" and include information about each image, including the source.

Each hypertext project will include a bibliography, which you may want to link to each citation as it appears in your text.  Your bibliography needs to be in MLA format, with the one exception that you should simply double space between entries and not try to indent text.  Since each browser displays text differently, and the resolution of the viewer's computer also affects the appearance of the page, it's just easier to double space between each bibliographical citation and call it a day.

• Where will you host your site?  A list of free hosts can be found by using the search terms "free web hosting" in Yahoo or some other search engine (leave off the quotation marks when typing them into the search engine window).  Send me your URL when you have something up that you don't mind folks seeing, and I'll put up a page with links to the different hypertext projects.  And if your site's a particularly good one, I may ask your permission to copy your pages and host them on the USC site for students to see as a model in the future.
• On your home page, or at a clearly marked link to another page, establish the purpose of your site early on--readers will want to know why you're doing what you're doing.
• Be sure to identify yourself, and provide opportunity for feedback by putting your email address on your site.
• At the bottom of your home page, include your URL and the date of the last update.
• Be sure all your links work.  If you want to have links open in a new browser window, warn the reader that this will happen (add this phrase to your HTML code to do that:  target="Resource Window").
• Each page should carry a link back to the home page.
• Proofread your pages carefully for errors.

Another interesting site containing lots of material you might find useful in writing a hypertext:  Hypertext Webs Navigation.