Week 1 – Web Design

Introduction
-A little about me.

Grading and class goals
-Grading has been posted to my web site
-Class Goals

  • To have all students be able to create a site from scratch
  • All student will understand the importance of design, layout, and color
  • All students will grasp the concepts of usability and functionality
  • Students will have at least a general understanding of color theory
  • Students will have at least a basic understanding of search engine optimization
  • Students will have a strong interest in becoming web designers :)

Who makes sites?
-Small & Large Web Design Firms
-Freelancers
-Advertising/Marketing Firms
-Internal Development Teams for various companies (Best Buy, Barnes and Noble, Target)
-Hybrid Businesses (Recording Studio / Web Design Firm)

What are the various positions on a web design/development team?
-Content Managers (Clients, Divisions of a company, Departments in a Company)
-Web Developers (Interactive Designers, Project Managers, Application Developers)
-IT Support (Help Desk Techs, Server Technicians)
-Security (A tech or service to monitor site security)

Skills Assessment (possible assignment)
-What do you know about Typography?
-What do you know about Color Theory?
-What is your software background?
-With your unique background what else can you bring to your web site design?

Hardware Advice
-A modern computer to run modern software

Software Advice
-A WYSIWYG HTML Editor (Dreamweaver or Aptana)
-An Image Editor (Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, GIMP, Something from the Aviary Suite)
-A Localized Web Server
-A Public Web Server

What is HTML?
-Is a combination of tags and rules which suggest how a page is to be structured and how text is to appear in a browser.

  • HTML – HyperText Markup Language
  • Tags – Are a tool for annotating sections within a web page document
  • Browsers – Are applications capable of processing HTML

HTML & WYSIWYG Editors
-Any basic text editor can create HTML
-WYSIWYG (“?”) is an application that allows a developer to see an end result in the program used for development.

Further Terminology Explained

  • DHTML – Dynamic HTML – is a combination of technologies which allow for the manipulation of HTML (javascript and CSS)
  • Javascript – is a scripting language used primarily with HTML sites. It runs in most cases on the client-side and is typically used to change the appearance of data or layout of an HTML document.
  • CSS – Cascading Style Sheets- is a client-side scripting language.  CSS is applied to tags and is used to set the layout and appearance of elements within a web page.
  • client-side script – any scripting language which is interpreted by a client’s browser.
  • server-side scripting language – is a technology which allows for the server to produce HTML from the selected scripting language.  examples include: PHP, Coldfusion, ASP, ASP .NET, Python, Perl, Java (as Java Server Pages)
  • Database – Batches of data typically stored in a relational model
  • Structured Query Languages – SQL & MySQL are used to ask a database to present, alter or delete data from a database.

LINKS:

WIKI – http://en.wikipedia.org/ (when you don’t know something try looking it up here)
Webmonkey – http://www.webmonkey.com/ (a resource for web developers)
OZZU – http://www.ozzu.com/ (a webmasters forum which covers a variety of topics)

Inspirational LINKS:
Web design trends of 2008 – http://www.webdesignerwall.com/trends/2008-design-trends/
Smashing Magazine – http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

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