1. Interactive Web Design (with dreamweaver and other tools)
Our aim in this course is to pick up skills that help us build sites that work uniformly across browsers and platforms (including mobile devices). We look at Dreamweaver, and (Netscape) Composer, blog engines and other web tools. Dreamweaver is one of the most popular web design tools. In this course we will build a complete website using the basic and more advanced features in Dreamweaver.We bring out some of our past projects and point out both technical and non-technical issues that a designer encounters in a web project.While building the site we will also look at some of these techniques that help you to make a better web site.
- Usability – How to study your customer’s requirement and best structure the information on your site? What are colors, fonts and layouts are user-friendly?, How to implement search features?, How to building multi-lingual sites? How to build sites that work well across different browsers or even on PDAs and mobile phones.
- Accessibility – Visually handicapped viewers use screen readers to access web pages. We will show you how to make your site work well with these tools.
- Updateable– More and more customers are now asking the designers to build web sites that they can themselves update. We will explore low cost and free Web design and Blogging software that help you build such sites.
We also give you a lowdown on how to find hosting services, getting a domain name and getting your site listed on search engines like Yahoo! and Google.
In the near future a larger percentage of web interaction would move to mobile devices. For the user the web will become more personal and role of a designer would be to come up with interesting activities that engage the user. We will spend some time discussing this interaction, emerging technologies, tools (and some science fiction) to try to figure out where the web is headed.Dreamweaver Class Notes | Dreamweaver Quick Start - (use this if you want a quick guide to Dreamweaver) | Making webpages with Netscape Composer
2. Flash
Look through the websites of companies like Nokia and you will see that they use Flash to show the features of their phones. Check a news web site and you will find Flash being used to build “interactives” that help the user understand a news story. Companies also use Flash based games to attract audience.In this course we will be looking at using ActionScript (the scripting environment in Flash) to build more involved Flash objects like the ones mentioned above. While we learn new concepts (like functions, event handlers and listeners, movie clips, OOP etc.) we will build or deconstruct practical Flash objects (like dynamic picture album, Audio and Video player and a game) that you can use or customize for your own site.
By 2007, more people will access the internet on mobile devices (PDA or Cell Phones) than on their computer. Flash is a good tool to develop applications and entertainment content for such devices. We will look at some of the techniques for building mobile Flash content.
Some of the examples I use in the course are at Flash for the People site.
3. Using the web in teaching
This section grew out of some of the teacher training courses I conduct and the articles I wrote for the teach magazine. The aim is to look at both commercial and freeware/shareware tools that teachers can use to get the students to interact and explore more. We develop learnning activities using discussion boards, weblogs, Wiki, chat and search engines etc. We also talk about content creation and related issues like copyrights, creating accessible content for learners with special needs and multilingual content.