Web Design 101: Study Group

By this week's work you should be feeling far more confident in your ability to create HTML files, markup your text with semantically correct tags, include images and to link between pages.

Already, you should see the beginnings of a basic website coming together. The content is there, some basic formatting and style is being provided through the default browser styling of HTML tags. Now, we can begin to learn Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) by adding custom styling to text elements.

Some of you may feel confident and may wish to start pursuing more advanced CSS straight away, however I do recommend that you focus your energy on adding styles to the text elements on your page.

Week Three Readings

CSS

• CSS Basics
• CSS Inheritance and Cascade
• Colour Theory on the Web
• Text Styling with CSS
• Typography on the Web
• Styling Lists and Links

Web Design and Project Planning

• Information Architecture Planning a Web Site
• What Does A Good Web Page Need?
• Building Up A Site Wireframe
• Colour Schemes and Design Mockups

Week Three Activities

• Remember to make a copy of Week Two's files and save them into a folder titled Week3.
• Write a short forum post describing what roles CSS and HTML have in the construction of a webpage. Provide an example of a CSS rule and explain the syntax including the selector and declaration.
  • If you are using a blog to document your webcraft experiences you may write the post in the blog. Please provide a link to the blog page within the forum so other participants can read your post and give you feedback.
• Create an initial stylesheet for the pages you created in Week Two.  All of your HTML pages should refer to the same stylesheet file - this ensures that your website style is consistent.
  • Create CSS rules for the text specific HTML tags that you have in your site (eg 'p', 'h1', 'blockquote').
  • Add comments to your CSS file which explain the selector types that you use in your stylesheet.  NOTE: CSS comments have a different format to HTML Comments. The correct syntax is described in the readings.
  • Share a link to your Week 3 work on the forum
• Give feedback to other members of the forum about their week 3 post and website work.
• Begin to think how you want your final website for this course to look.

Please use the Community forum for Week 3 to share your work and discuss the readings and concepts you are learnign this week.