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Project - hand code a website
If you are a beginner or an intermediate web designer who is interested in becoming a professional web and/or interaction designer, or simply want to more fully understand the basic techniques and processes used to design and develop websites, this is the place to start. You will use a simple text editor to write web pages and sites that follow Web Standards.
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This is the traditional method to learn the basics of web design and production. Start here with the following steps: - check under the "resources" menu above.
- Understand the Internet and the Web - do a little research.
- The importance here is to understand the environment in which you will work. There is a huge difference between users and developers, we're developers.
- Gather your toolset, a text editor in this case.
- TextWrangler is available on the Mac lab machines. You can use any text editor.
- Build your reference materials library/bookmarks. Have references for:
- The (X)HTML Language - the source coding language of the Web.
- Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) - the rules based styling commands common to most browsers
- Javascript - the dialect of ECMAScript (European Computer Manufacturers Association). as is Adobe's Actionscript(Flash) and JScript(Microsoft)
- Understand how to work locally and then move your work to your web server
Once you have gone through the above "steps" you will find that learning IDEs such as Dreamweaver to be much faster, and, easier.
If you select this project you will spend the first part of this semester building a series of websites (sandboxes) to experiment and learn (X) HTML, CSS, and how to use Javascript frameworks to increase the interactivity of your designs. Once you feel comfortable hand-coding a site you can switch back and forth between hand coding and using some of Dreamweaver's features.
First we'll make a starter website to learn the application interface and the basics of building a simple website. During this initial portion of the project we'll work through several exercises where you will learn 1) the basic functionality of Dreamweaver; layout, navigation, structure, and styling, 2) the procedures for structuring a website; making the directories and files, and, 3) the methods used to move local files to and from your web server.
Once you have the basics mastered you can move on to design and build a website of your own design. You can also learn a little Dreamweaver as we move along. Many web professional use a little DW, perhaps some of the SPRY widgets but do the bulk of their work by hand. It's a craftsmanship thing.
The goal of this project
is to have you feeling comfortable with hand coding a basic website by the end of this semester.
You are free to establish, and then meet, your own mileposts/objectives to guide yourself to this goal by the end of this semester.
