Communication 326: Web Production

Syllabus (pdf or html) & calendar

The class...

Student pages & faces:
COMS 326-01
and 326-02

(See bigger video?)

An intro to Web design ideas & tools, including HTML, CSS, Dreamweaver & more.

Latest assignment & classwork updates:

Nov. 17-19

Nov. 10-12

On Tuesday: More about colors, images and video for your Web pages.

By Thursday: Write a proposal-page for your final project.

Nov. 3-5

Oct. 27-29

Weekend additions:

Here are a couple of multimedia-related articles I ran into this weekend:

Oct. 20-22

Thursday -- Getting started with Dreamweaver.
In-class: The Properties Inspector Panel for HTML and CSS. At home, explore these:

Tuesday -- By popular demand: What are your legal rights and responsibilities concerning "intellectual property" and related issues? When can you use an image you found online? How much of someone's writing can you quote? The EFF Bloggers Legal Guide is a good summary, applicable to personal Web sites of all kinds. Also see this Creative Commons search and info site. For a very special approach to sharing images, see Philip Greenspun's copyright notice and photos (and don't be a weasel).

Oct. 13-15 and through the weekend: Update your review sites. Then, to get started with Dreamweaver, read this SND Update and watch Adobe videos one, two (about planning) and three (about CSS layouts). They take five or six minutes each.

Once I'm done looking at your sites, I'll update the semester calendar.

Oct. 9: Although today is the official deadline for the review projects, I won't start looking at them for grading purposes until Sunday afternoon, so that you can squeeze in some last tweaks.

Sept.28 in-class: If the Sept. 24 exercise was too much code at once, work through this Step-by-step CSS tutorial, which also includes the magic trick of turning a "list" into a "menu" for navigation purposes. If that's all clear, see the "further readings" at the end of the article... or resume taking screen snapshots to go with your reviews (see below), or improving the layout of your home page and review pages.

Sept. 24 in-class and homework (orange page formatted with CSS, lists and fonts)

By popular request:
Screen-capturing for any computer


Textbook authors' book pages:

Along with the textbooks, we'll use a growing list of online tutorials and reference pages in class, starting with the Basic HTML pages at w3schools.com, then the same site's CSS tutorial, to separate layout from content.

For local Web building information, here's a Radford Web tools screencast, and some Unix tips.

The first five or six weeks of learning Web-building tools will be reflected in a "multimedia website reviews" midterm project. That is, the project will be a multi-page Web essay reviewing the use of multimedia storytelling techniques on Web sites. (The projects themselves do not have to include original multimedia creations.) See the assignment sheet and file structure description.

The semester schedule included in the original syllabus (html version) is a beginning, butwe now have an expanded calendar with reading assignments, visiting speakers, weekly tasks, class notes, and specific tutorial links.

Introduction to the course

The Web itself is perhaps the best-documented topic on the Internet, unless you count Michael Jackson and Britney Spears. (Actually, searching for "HTML tutorial" on Google just got 346,000 hits, to Britney's 75 million, or Michael's 185 million. Oh well.)

As part of this course, we'll be using Google and a variety of directories, blogs, wikis and social networking sites to keep up with the latest Web tools and online services. Speaking of tools, we get to use a lab full of brand new big-screen iMacs and some of the latest -- and oldest -- software tools.

What else is this class about? Making Web pages... and avoiding UGLY.

... or maybe redefining it. (Thanks to Ze Frank and Vincent Flanders for sharing great advice in an entertaining way.)

While we're on the subject, is this page ugly because of that block of white space on the left? Or are the color choices too garish? We'll talk about issues like that, and about the way some Web tools have "trade-offs" that result in glitches like the white space, or features that add flexibility never seen before the Web. Are my Unix info pages better? Do you like being able to make the text window as wide or narrow as you want?

As the course progresses, we'll address questions like that, which fall under the headings "usability" and "accessibility."

If the lessons seem too easy or move too fast, you may find resources more suited to your learning style and pace in the professor's collection of hundreds of bookmarks at delicious.com.

Here's a note about using them... You can start at http://delicious.com/bstepno, or any of the categories shown in the menu at the left.

Fortunately, the designers of delicious.com make it easy to tag and retrieve bookmarks with keywords, such as this course number:
http://delicious.com/bstepno/326.
Notice that the first keyword, "326," is separated from my name with a slash. Any other keywords ("tutorials" and "html") can be added with plus signs, like this:
http://delicious.com/bstepno/326+html+tutorials

That's a beginning. See you in school.