Build your own Website. Tutor: Colin Hume
This course will teach you how to create a website and make it available to the world. It will not teach you how to use DreamWeaver or FrontPage. It will teach you how to set up web pages yourself and link them together as you wish. This means you understand what's going on and can fix problems. There are lots of very pretty websites out there which have been professionally and expensively designed, but the owners have no idea how to update them — or every time they try, something goes wrong. I won't leave you in the lurch like that! Many websites contain just static text — every time someone clicks on the page they see the same thing unless the owner has manually updated it. More complicated websites are dynamic — the user inputs some information and the results of a calculation or search are displayed. For static websites I use HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) — the standard language of websites since the web started, and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) — so that you can change the style of all your web pages in one place rather than having to search through all the pages for purple titles because you've decided you prefer blue ones. I also use small amounts of JavaScript where necessary. For dynamic web sites, in addition to all this I use Microsoft's ASP (Active Server Pages) or ASP.NET, and if I need a database I use Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL Server, though there's no problem using other standard databases. I won't be covering any of this on the course — let me know if you want a separate course! I've run this course three times at Letchworth Settlement which is not a high-tech teaching environment, so you won't be trying things out on a PC during the class unless you bring your own laptop, but there will be some written exercises and homework. Notes will be available on my website after each session. The Settlement say they don't have enough people interested to warrant running it again, so I don't know when and where I will next get to teach it — I'm open to offers!
Session 1
What do you want your website to do, and who is it aimed at? Content and Layout. Website structure and navigation. Hypertext Markup Language. Tags and Elements. Spacing. Standard tags: HTML, Head, Title, Body, H1-H6. Structure and Indenting. The WebEdit program.Session 2
Lists. Tables.Session 3
Creating the website structure on your local drive. Testing your site on your own PC. Uploading the site: FTP clients. Images. Linking pages together. Building a Menu. Browsers. Web Hosting: Free and cheap.Session 4
Cascading Style Sheets. Syntax. Div and Span tags. Three places to put CSS. Font properties. Padding, Border and Margin properties.Session 5
Colours and background images. Menus and CSS. Block and Inline elements. DocType. Updating the menu structure.Session 6
Meta tags. Printing. Grabbing stuff from other people's websites. Displaying tables with CSS.Advice for Mac users
Tools for checking your website
Other topics for further study
JavaScript. Menus and Frames. Menus without frames. Server-Side Includes. Columns. Deprecated HTML. Font sizes. Z-Index. Running Dynamic code on the server. Music and Videos