(AKA: Web Design with Hugh Miller) 

This is a six session class (2 hours each) in beginning web design. It starts with basics: links, text formatting and page appearance. My focus in the class is good workflow. How to work like a professional – in other words, how to do web design and still get home for dinner. The software is Adobe Dreamweaver, this is important to understand: We DO work with HTML and CSS the entire time but we are not typing code except for simple small examples. A non-professional seeking to develop a web site by typing code would need that class to a year long and meet twice a week.

  • Session 1: Realities in the world of web design. Setting up your site. The Dreamweaver interface. Adding links and images.
  • Session 2: Beginning Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The power workflow for controlling how your pages look and behave.
  • Session 3: Beginning CSS page layout.
  • Session 4: Design production.
  • Session 5: Templates: Take charge of everything on your web site with this brilliant web site power tool.
  • Session 6: Uploading and publishing. Finding a web host, reserving domains, getting ready for Google.

You will also find these videos useful for refreshing your memory. They were originally used for a quarter long credit class so you may hear me talking about irrelevant things like portfolios  but it’s right on topic for the techniques we are learning.

Session 1.

The real basics of web design, issues in how web pages appear, the uncertainty principle. Getting started in Dreamweaver. Setting up a site, picking a root folder. The Dreamweaver interface, the difference workspaces, the properties inspector. Creating files, making links, absolute and relative. Adding images and very very simple CSS. HTML is structure, and CSS is design.

Session 2

We are starting to learn some basic CSS to go with our HTML. Remember that HTML is rather like the structural framework of our document. Having a good internal framework is a really important thing but the appearance of the page should never be managed by adding inline attributes to HTML. Like font, font size or color. This sort of thing was done in the very early days of the web and it made for pages that were very hard to edit for appearance issues. CSS was created to answer this problem. Here’s a video about basic CSS.

and here’s another one about the problem of aligning images

Session 3

Recap on basic CSS and beginning to use plain vanilla div tags and style them via CSS. Here is a video on that subject.

Session 4

Continuing to bear down on that subject.

Session 5

Introducing templates. Templates are a fantastic tool for high speed production and updating of web pages. Check out this video for a reminder of how to start the process.

And this one on making pages from your template:

and this one on updating the template AND the pages:

Session 6

we start learning about publishing our files using the FTP program that’s tucked away inside Dreamweaver. The video I’m posting here is helpful on this subject but I made it for a class that was further along in the quarter. Don’t worry about things I say concerning a final exam and such…just try to absorb the simple lessons of publishing files into web folders.


 

Handouts

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