for our ipt project we weren't allowed to use any images not otherwised provided, use any texts other than the text provided, use any templates or frames to make it fair for the students who haven't gone to the trouble of learning CSS, frames, templates, dhtml. Basically you have to make do with what they give you
I think in general its really difficult to judge how well a website is made but our criteria is more or less, that it has to be compatible with all computers, with working hyperlinks and undistracting simple backgrounds which attentuate rather than distract
our teacher has already said some things about testing it on several computers all at different resolutions, different colours (high colour, 256 colour etc) with different operating systems so we have to use images which are standerized and highly compatible on all computers (.gif, jpeg ?) refrain from using anything that requires third party software or is not widely supported such as flash, java applet, java script, also marks would be taken off it if takes longer than 10 seconds to load on a standard 56 k modem so the images have to be appropriately compressed without being too pixelised or bad looking, fonts have to be fairly standerized as well, eg. windows fonts may not all work on another operating system, the html has to be fairly standerized and comply with w3c. Theres also many other things but thats all i can think of the top of my head
My biggest problem really is designing for resolutions which range from 800*600 to the huge school moniters of 1024*768. I don't think your teacher would be easily impressed by flashy videos, extreme dhtml or java applets, i don't actually think the whole thing is about being an internet design elite but more about your understanding of the design principals such as large enough easy to read text size, contrasting background, easy navigation, consistency throughout pages