Web Design 101: Study Group

This community is working together to explore core principles of developing standards compliant web pages. By following the readings and working on recommended activities you'll begin to  learn how to define your page structure and content in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and how to add style to your page using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Please Note: This is not a facilitated course. This space acts a place to ask questions around a shared set of materials and activities. Courses for P2PU and School of Webcraft will begin again in January 2011.

To take best advantage of this community you will need to engage with each other: ask questions! give advice! be supportive!

It's recommended that you find a study partner from within the community and work together with them to develop a study plan for the readings and activities. Having a study partner will keep you motivated.

The learning materials shared in this study group cover the core principles of developing standards compliant web pages. They are intended to help you learn how to define your page structure and content in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and how to add style to your page using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Topics covered:

• How is a webpage constructed?
• What are web standards?
• What are the basic tools required to build a simple web site?
• How can I fix mistakes in my website code?
• How do I make my site visible on the web?

Participants should aim to  create simple websites (6-8 pages) containing text, images and hypertext links and can use this as a foundation for more advanced skills they can continue to develop in the School of Webcraft.  Course participants will learn about the importance of open web standards, will test their code on different browsers and will validate their code to guarantee it conforms to web standards.  Participants will also document techniques and code using a wiki - this will be used as a learning resource for future courses.

Please Note: only open web technologies will discussed during this course - proprietary formats such as Flash are not taught in the School of Webcraft.