William P. Craft

First, let me explain how this course is organized...

Class starts on August 27th and ends on Dec 19th. That gives us 16.5 weeks, including holidays, to conduct the course. That seems like a lot of time, but we have a lot to cover and time will go by quickly.

I have actually cut required content to the bare minimum of what you need to know because this is only a 2 unit class; however, I will give you the opportunity to cover two advanced topics on an optional basis. Don't worry, you can get full credit without studying the optional topics, but you can get a little extra credit if you do them.

The first 12 weeks of the course, we will cover one chapter per week in the textbook. During this period, all assigments, discussions, assessments, and projects are due 2 weeks after they are first assigned. The due date is always noted in the WebCT system.

The last 4.5 weeks will be used for two things:

  1. creating the final project. (Everybody)
  2. covering chapters 13 and 14 of the text. (Optional)

During the first 12 weeks we will follow a standard format. There will be:

  1. a page or two of comments from me, to help you get the most out of the reading and to give you any special instructions for exercises that are due
  2. one of more discussion items
  3. a reading assignment
  4. a quiz on the reading
  5. an exercise that you will turn in to me as a zip file (weeks 1-4) or that you will post to your personal website (weeks 5-12)

During the last 4.5 weeks things will not be as organized. There will be two additional chapters covered in the textbook for those who want to do so, but there will also be time for you to work on your final project. As you might expect, the final project will be to design and post a website. After all, that's why you took the course!

During the final weeks I will check email frequently, so if you have questions, I can give you a speedy answer. However, we will need to limit questions and answers to topics that we cover in this course. (A person could easily take 50 or more units of web design courses covering the wide array of web technologies that are in use today on the Internet. We are only doing the first two units so we need to stick to the basics.<grin>)

I mentioned two things in the previous paragraphs that you might not understand; so let's cover them now.

Zip file:

If you need to send a collection of files and folders to somebody (like me) and want the files and folders all to stay in a particular arrangement, the easiest way to do that is to put everything into a single folder and "zip" it up.

In Windows XP and in Windows Vista the procedure is pretty much the same:

  1. Make a new folder on your desktop. Give it a descriptive name such as: week-1
  2. Put any folders or files that you need to send me in this week-1 folder that you just made. For example: you might have a folder called week-1, and inside that folder you might put a file called mypage.html and another folder called images. Inside the folder called images you might put a image file called dog.jpg which is used as a picture in the document called mypage.html. (This stuff about folders inside of folders will be discussed in the text.)
  3. once you have your desktop folder all ready to go, you right-click on it and select "Send to" and then select "Compressed (zipped) Folder"
  4. a new folder called week-1.zip will be created.
  5. when you send me your assignment, there will be a place for you to attach the zipped folder that you just made. Then I will get it all in order, just like you want me to see it.

Personal Web Site:

Let's face it. If you are going to do web pages and make web sites, you need to know how to post the files you create onto a real-world, on-the-net webserver. If all you have is a bunch of files on your or my computer, you don't really have a web page. Your files have to be visible on the Internet for everyone to see before you really have a website.

So, what are your options?

All this will be discussed in full detail in my "Week 4 Comments" and in Chapter 4 of the text, but if you think you may like doing this the "better way" you may want to read ahead and get started early. On the Home Page of the course there is a folder that has some reliable Web Hosting Providers for your info.

This Week:

Reading Assignment

Read the textbook Intro Chapter. You can skim the Intro Chapter since it is mostly about the "way" they wrote the book--interesting but not directly related to web page creation.

Read Chapter One, closely, and do all the exercises in the chapter. There is really no way to learn this stuff without the hands-on experience of actually doing the exercises and writing the code. The answers are at the end of the chapter! Check each exercise after you do it; don't wait to do the entire chapter first. If you get a question wrong, make sure you know what you did wrong. You need to know this stuff to do good web pages--and to pass the quiz on this chapter.

Discussion:

This week we have three discussion topics. The first should be easy. Just tell us a little about yourself, and tell us if you have had any previous experience in web design. The second and third discussions are somewhat related. Each student should provide the address of a "good" website and a "bad" website and tell the class why they think they are either good or bad. Don't worry at this point about technical issues. Just react to the websites at a personal level and tell us why you think they are good or bad. Next, check out the entries your classmates have provided. At a minimum, to get full credit you must comment on 2 good sites and 2 bad sites nominated by someone other than yourself. If you want to comment on them all, go for it. Note that this Discussion Item will close on September 10th. To get credit you must participate before the topic is closed.

Assignment:

Attach the html file that you made for the exercise on page 33. Note that the due date is September 10th.

Quiz:

Take the quiz. Note that the due date is September 10th.

...WPC

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