Web Design & Development

First of all, about the learning teams. I realize that many of you will not know each other at all, and may have no particular choice as to who is on you team. That is fine! For those of you who would like to work together, as indicated in the assignments, please e-mail me those names. For those of you who really have no preference, please e-mail me that information and I will randomly put teams together.

The purpose of these teams is to help provide a first line of help in dealing with the assignments in the course. Please begin communicating with your team on the group discussion board or e-mail. Your team members may be able to give you some guidance on a problem. Think of them as a study group in a "normal" classroom situation. Later in the course, your other team members will become your "beta testers" to give you input on your final project. For every site that I have developed, I have had to find testers, so having a team ready-made can be a big help.

Secondly, your student Student Page can be a big help to me and to the rest of the class in becoming acquainted. This page really takes the place of the face-to-face meeting in a classroom. Please provide a photo. I might recommend that you check the size of your photo before you add it to the page. For example: my head shot (I use it for my 2nd career of acting) was scanned at 10% on my scanner to make it small enough (it was originally an 8"x10"). I checked the size by opening the photo in Adobe PhotoDeluxe and going to "size". I then checked the pixel information and found that it was 197x290. You can judge your own photos from that size. It will become very important to us to know the width and height of any image we put on a page.

Next, I will be commenting a lot about the levels, or layers, in a web site. This refers to the actual design of the site and will affect the pathnames you use when you create links within a site. For now, as you navigate though a site on the web, watch the url addresses that appear in the locator bar at the top of the page. This will begin to show you some of the levels that you are going through, and how complicated (or easy) the web designers have made it. Knowing these levels can make changing the site much easier.

Another note on urls. You may have noticed that some urls include the word "index", some include ".html" or ".htm", and some do not. My recommendation is to always include the entire url when you are sending it to me. That way we can avoid some lost time when I try to access your pages. We will also discuss more about the basics of a url when we get to links, but let me give you a quick rundown of the pieces ---

My Portfolio is located at (if you want to see it, copy and paste the url into your browser's locater) http://www.coe.missouri.edu/~kc157/Portfolio/index.html

As Lemay tells you in Day 1, http is "hypertext transfer protocol", the language for the web.

www.coe.missouri.edu puts me onto the College of Education server in Columia.

Each slash mark "/" is a level indicator for the server. So ~kc157 takes you to my part of the server, then drop one level to the file/folder I have named "Portfolio" (and letter case does matter), then drop one more level into that folder to find the index which is written in html.

You may see two periods appear in some urls. For example: "../../pics/homebutton.gif". The two periods mean to go up one file/folder. So in this example, I would be going up two levels to find the "pics" file, and down in the pics file is the picture "homebutton" saved in gif format.

Is this too much for right now? Just read it over, and give it a chance to percolate for a while. We'll go over it more when we talk about the site design and storyboard.

Finally, it is very important that you obtain an "ftp" or "fetch" program. Check the information in the beginning of Lesson 1 in the Assignments. This will take you through the steps to download the program. You might also want to look over the information about ftp in the Course Documents. (more to come in Lesson 3)

This may be a little overwhelming at first, but we need to get the new terminology and programs that we'll need ready to go. Keep working, keep asking questions, and keep an eye on due dates.