Although we are not doing a formal class for credit involving grades and such, I am going to at least begin as if we were. As you go through each of the lessons that I present, I will work on the next lesson for you. Each lesson will be added to the menu that you see on the left hand side of your browser window so that you can easily move from lesson to lesson. It may be helpful for you to return to previous lessons, thus I am doing things to make it as easy for you as possible.
Having taught several courses dealing with web pages, I already have quite a bit of material. For the most part, I will just be reformatting work I've already done for classes that I have taught. As we work through this "course", I'll be presenting information from several different courses. In particular, I will present to you courses consisting of Operating Systems, HTML/CSS levels 1 & 2, and Programming for the web. This, if taken as for-credit college classes, will be the equivalent of about 12 credit hours (4 3 credit hour courses). Don't worry if you don't understand these terms right now, before we are finished, you will.
By the time you finish with all of the lessons presented, you should have a good working knowledge of HTML/CSS for presenting static (infrequently changing) pages and a small amount of programming, enough to be able to create some interactive and generated pages for frequently changing and calculated information. You will also learn enough about files, file systems and directories to know where files need to be saved, proper naming conventions and differences between different file types. Although very simple web pages can be done using only one file, more complicated pages may utilize several files. Again, if you don't understand these terms right now, before we are finished, you will. A complete website will usually consist of many files.
As you work through the material presented, you'll need to download and install some needed programs for working with your website. By the time you are finished, you will have developed a working website located on my personal web server. With this goal in mind, you should begin thinking about what kind of website you wish to build. Some suggestions are a personal site containing pictures and information about yourself for friends and family, a business site giving information for customers to learn about a business that you run, a purely informational site on a topic that you know well, an organizational information site providing information to members and the public. Examples of each type of site follow:
Explore these sites a bit to see what each has to offer, you may get some ideas for your site. Visit at least 4 links from each of the sites. Try to pick out the common pages and concepts, for instance, does each site have a contact page? Is it easy or hard to move from page to page? Is the color scheme pleasing to your eye? The fonts too small or too big?
After selecting a type of site to build, sketch a rough outline and send to me. It can be as simple as the example to the right. Note that I will use the same style for each example that is presented. Your site should consist of a minimum of 5 pages as shown in the example.
Main page -|
Contacts
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Site Map
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Subtopic 1
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Subtopic 2
After completing your site outline, go on to the next lesson, Files and File Systems. You may want to bookmark (add to favorites) this page as it is a good starting point to reach all of the lessons as I present them for you.