Advanced topics in creating web sites.

Welcome to the advanced topics in creating websites component of our computer skills program.

 

As with all of our programs, the first lesson is free, available to anyone. Subsequent lessons are included in the cost of an enrollment. Additional features (video transcripts, test files, and so on) are included when you enroll.

Here we assume you have all the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript down.

The topics below explore specific areas of interest. The first eight lessons are in a stepwise order: based on how to create a website like trainersfriend.com/takayama/. The labs then follow a parallel order in building a mythical, but similar, website.

Later lessons are simply topics I've learned about or gotten interested in, usually probing deeper in to some topic already discussed in these courses, but sometimes I go off in a whole new direction.

I regularly add lessons to this course, and enrolled students will get emails informing them of newly available lessons.

If there are topics of particular interest to you, let me know and I'll see if I can work up a lesson.

Available lessons:

1. Layout and design
    Two videos
    Wire framing
    Logo and title placement
    Spacing
    Rounded borders
    Exercise: download files, build home page

2. Backgrounds
    Two videos
    background-color property
    color stops
    linear-gradients
    radial-gradients
    Exercise: experiment with background colors
    background-image property
    sources for images
    Exercise: locate images and test as background

3. Page framing
    Two videos
    Frame components
    Process of building a page
    The line-height style property
    Exercise: build a page with two columns
    Borders around images
    The box-shadow property
    Exercise: build a page based on an existing page


4. Server Side Includes
    One video
    Creating include files
    <!--#include directive
    "file=" vs. "virtual="
    Renaming pages to be ".shtml"
    <!--#echo directive
    <!--#config directive
    Exercise: convert previous solutions to use SSI


5. Introduction to CGI programming
    One video
    'Submit' processing
    Data checking
    The form dataset
    Passing request to server
    Server set up to run CGI
    Possible actions of CGI
    Exercise:


6. Introduction to php
    One video
    Case sensitive
    Statements end with semi-colon (;)
    Single line and multi-line comments
    Variable names
    Blank lines
    Data types: boolean, numeric, string
    Single-quoted strings and double-quoted strings
    Assignment operator
    Arithmetic operators
    String concatenation
    Using '_GET["name"] to access values from submitting form
    Basic processing
    'echo' function
    Exercise: a basic php CGI


7. php: logic and emails
    Two videos
    Logical / boolean 'true' and 'false'
    Comparison operators
    The 'if' statement
    $_GET, $_POST, and $_SERVER arrays
    the 'mail()' function
    Exercise: using 'if', mail() and accessing the $_SERVER variables
    Logical operators (and, or, xor, !)
    Nested 'if's
    Exercise: format a street address


8. php: string handling and date / time
    Two videos
    strtoupper
    strtolower
    ucfirst
    lcfirst
    ucwords
    str_replace
    str_ireplace
    date function
    formatting date values
    formatting time values
    Exercise:
    


9. php: working with files


10. Navigation I: embedded links and link boxes

11. Navigation II: horizontal bar

12. Processing images