Otherwise known as the Dreamweaver course, it applies an intermediate knowledge of (X)HTML and Cascading Style Sheets to Adobe's web design tool. The first third or so of the course focuses on learning the Dreamweaver environment by applying what was learned in the HTML course without hand coding. The rest of the course revolves around other Dreamweaver capabilities and the fundamentals of designing a reasonably functional web site.
Lab 0 is not represented with it's own web page, but it is the existance of the web site. The goal was to register a URL and setup the website at a host.
Lab 1 is a set of folders within the web site, each with files typically found on the internet, emphsizing the need for good structure in a web site.
Lab 2 includes a simple navigation menu and a set of closely-linked web pages, demonstrating most of the ways links are used with text.
Lab 3 continues as a demontration of links, this time focusing on image maps (links embedded in an image). I also show how a series of web pages could be linked in a linear fashion to suit the content, rather than a hierarchical fashion. The links on the maps are not very obvious. A primary criteria for the choice of an image should be its ability to clearly show the links that will overlay it. If I were to redo this lab, using maps with clear state outlines and minimal geographic information would be better.
Lab 4 introduces the use of a table to control the layout of a page. I used Photoshop to slice an image of the musical score's first page into pieces that became either static images in a table cell or buttons that linked to other pages. The buttons turned out to be less prominent than they should be. The images of the core on teh video are almost illegible. Perhaps I will learn better techniques later in the course.
Lab 5 employs the swap image technique to display a page of music while the music is playing. It does require the user to be able to read music well enough to point the mouse at the right page at the right time as the page changes are not synchronized to the music.
Lab 6 has an embedded playlist of MP3s, an ancient Java applet, and a video with a soundtrack. The layout for these pages is similar to Lab 5 in that it employs an auto-stretch table.
Lab 7 is one of a double-barreled introduction to cascading style sheets (the other is Lab 9 in MMDT 1021, the HTML class). This one, obviously, deals with CSS in the context of Dreamweaver and consists of a mock company web site that sells battleships. It also served to exercise a recently-learned Photoshop skill, namely layer masks, to produce the background image. This lab was also just complex enough to do a design specification. It primarily served to organize the folder and file structure as well as sketch out the content.
Lab 8 is built with layers (technically AP Divs, meaning Absolute Position Divisions) wich allows images and text to be overlayed. The first page of this lab takes a few lines from Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha and adds flow and illustrations. The images could use a considerable amount of clean-up, but the concept is there. Two other pages (follow the Page 2 link) contain a jury-rigged wargame in two versions, one using AP Divs and the other converted from AP Div into table layout, in the process of which it lost some unit positioning precision. Toggle back an forth between the two pages and you'll see the units shift up and down.
Lab 9, the last lab for this class, introduces us to the process of submitting data to a server application. Our instructor has written a short program that echoes back the information the form sends; next semester I'll learn how to write one myself using PHP and mySQL.
The Final Project is done. It is a web site for a fictitious company that sells ERP software and incudes many of the techniques I've learned during the semester, as well as some Photoshop and Illustrator work.