Course DescriptionDuring this course, students will create several web sites, increasing in complexity. Exploration and analysis of existing sites on the web will also be a focus, and source for information. Students will prove competencies by: passing performance exam, and completing practical exercises and projects.
The focus of this course is to create well designed web pages. The more comfortable you are with design and illustration, the smoother the transition will be in designing for the web. Keep in mind that this technology is changing constantly. Parts of what you learn today could be obsolete soon. Keep your ears and minds open to new ways of handling this medium. Become an internet user. The more you surf and see other sites, the more ideas and information you will have to bring to your own work.
Course Content
- Internet/Browsers
- Netscape
- Internet Explorer
- Safari
- Firefox
- cross browser compatibility
- search engines
Interactive Design & the Design Process
- preliminary planning
- audience, content, purpose of web sites
- navigation planning
- story boarding/flowcharts
- content development
- content acquisition
- branding strategies
- page layout layout & visual hierarchy
- navigation strategies
- incorporating graphics
- hyperlinks
- web safe colors
- aesthetics of backgrounds
- creating & manipulating tables
- images split into tables
typography
- type design principles
- font/size choices
- HTML vs. graphics based
- alignment techniques
Usability
- accessibility
- testing
- file management
- multi-purposing web
- WYSIWYG program
Graphics
- creating graphics (photoshop/imageready & illustrator)
- gifs vs. jpeg
- non-rectangular images
- transparent images
- file optimization/low memory graphics
- browser safe color palette
- hexadecimal based HTML codes
- animated gifs
- creating image maps
- tiled backgrounds
- interlaced & progressive graphics
- rollovers
- graphic do’s & don't’s
Programming
- HTML programming
- incorporating Javascript
- cascading style sheets (CSS)