Cert IV Websites @ TAFE

Thursday 19th June

2008-06-19T01:18:00.001+10:00

Just a reminder that we have Copyright Trivia running from 9:15 this morning (for those partaking); then at 11:30am we have Guest Speaker Russ Weakley telling us tales from A Day in the Life of a Web Developer!

As a side note, for those of you wishing to explore Drupal more over the holidays, there are a few entry level articles/tutorials to be found here: http://learnbythedrop.com/archives

See you all in the morning,

Ray

Tuesday 10th June 2008

2008-06-09T17:55:00.001+10:00

This mornings Workshop will start a bit later than usual. There is a presentation happening in the back Call Off Room, so we will not be able to wander in there until after 10.30

Today we are going to have a mini intro to Javascript, but nothing too technical - I guarantee this will not be taxing!

We are going to have a brief look at a few Meta Tags (as we haven't covered them in great detail as yet), and a couple of HTML techniques and tricks.

Then we are going to install Lightbox - http://www.lokeshdhakar.com/projects/lightbox2/ - a great, free, easy to install and use Javascript that unobtrusively sits above our HTML. Starting with a plain, vanilla flavoured HTML image gallery, we will add Lightbox to bring it to life.

We will probably need around an hour to one and a half hours to get through this workshop. The remainder of the time before and after is available for you to work on your own projects. As I said, its not an overly technical workshop so hope you can all make it!

COPYRIGHT TRIVIA

2008-05-31T14:49:00.004+10:00

Below are some questions to start you off on your copyright adventure which will culminate in Copyright Trivia, on 19th June [week 17] This activity will give you most of the evidence you need to achieve competency in the Learning Unit: CUSADM08A Address Copyright Requirements. Please read everything carefully before starting. There are more than the questions on this blog! Read to the end of the blog entry.....

GAME 'RULES'
First, find 1-2 other people to form a team of 2-3 [max is 3] for the Copyright Trivia day. Then find out as much info as you can about copyright and web sites/web design.Use the questions and sites below to guide you through the Labyrinth of Copyright issues.

What is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?
Who owns the copyright of a website you design?
Why is copyright important?
How do you apply for copyright of a site?
Basically the law says that you are not allowed to copy someone’s work without their permission- but there are 3 exceptions to the rule. What are they?
What copyright information do you have to put on your websites?
Who are the following people and what do they have to do with copyright?Rick Boucher, Prof Henry Perritt, Prof Lawrence Lessig
What is copyright?
What are the requirements to copyright a product?
What happens when someone breaks copyright?
How long does copyright last?

Is everything subjected to copyright laws? If not, what isn't?
What are the following bodies and what do they have to do with copyright laws?
WIPO
WPPT
WCT

USEFUL WEBSITES:

For information about digital copyright issues, check out the Australian Government Department of Broadband Communications, and the Digital Economy. There are several copyright issues covered from their site and linked sites.
http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/laca/copyrightenforcement/contents.htm or
http://www.dbcde.gov.au/home/intellectual_property

Regulations regarding the use of visual material that is not yours:
http://www.copyright.org.au/information/specialinterest/visart.htm

The Australian Copyright Council provides an online service to inform people of copyright regulations and to lobby the government for fair copyright practices:
http://www.copyright.org.au/index.htm

Creative Commons is a website that enables web developers [and others involved in electronic communications] to publish material that is protected from copyright infringement. They issue licences for copyright protections and inform you of what is copyright and what is not.
http://creativecommons.org/

DO NOT limit your researching to these sites alone….they only give you part of the picture.

In order to achieve competence in the Unit: CUSADM08A Address copyright requirements you and your team members must answer 50% of the questions correctly. Winning teams are generously rewarded.

Happy Researching!!
Genie

PS: There are prizes to be won in this game as well as obtaining a mark in the unit.

Tuesday 27th May 2008

2008-05-26T13:15:00.001+10:00

Folks I have decided to postpone tomorrows planned workshop (Javascript) until next week, to allow Project participants to continue working on their projects. At this stage, Thursdays workshops will go ahead this week (though I will discuss this with all of you and Genie tomorrow).

See you all tomorrow.

Thursday 22nd May 2008

2008-05-21T14:46:00.001+10:00

Just a reminder that all scheduled workshops for Thursday have been canceled!

The program for Thursday will thus be:

9:30am - 10:00am: Group Meeting/Briefing (all students)
12:30pm - 1:00pm: Team Meeting
1:00pm - 1:45pm: Lunch
10am - 5pm: Those involved in the Re-design Project will work on the projects - NOTE: Each group is expected to present their Proposal and Mockup to Genie tomorrow - which implies that both items must be complete tomorrow. As a result Genie's Feasibility workshop will also be postponed.
10am - 5pm: Those NOT involved in the Re-design Project will work on their own projects/work

Please note:

At some point during the day I would like to spend an hour or two in an Open Forum with the continuing students from last year. The topic of discussion is totally open, so we can discuss/clarify anything that you feel needs discussion/clarification. Depending on availability this will take place in one of the call-off rooms.

I would like to spend the remainder of the day free to assist individuals/groups with their own/project work. If you feel you have nothing to do then I would assume you are a Web Guru and can answer any random web related question I can throw at you (!); however, if you need some guidance in what to do I might suggest:

Have you completed all of the HTML and CSS Challenges? http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/HTML_Challenges and http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/CSS_challenges
Have you installed XAMPP on your thumbdrive, and commenced any of the PHP Challenges (if you are doing beginners/advanced programming on Thursdays)? http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/PHP_challenges
Is all of the work you have completed to date in order and ready for presentation as evidence of your completing the modules?
Is all of your Multimedia modules work up to date?
Is all of your Client Interaction modules work up to date?
If you are involved in the Small Web Project, are you up to date with both Client Interaction and Technical requirements?
Have you read all of the Further Reading items posted on the Blog to date? If not it might be a good time to catch up on that - keeping in mind that reading is only half of learning ie: don't forget to try out any of the techniques or approached that may be discussed in the reading list. Setting up demo/test pages that illustrate certain techniques can also be added to your evidence!! Better still, applying any/all of those techniques in a website you are working on (ie: a 'real live' implementation) will constitute higher weighted evidence.

See you all on Thursday!

Tuesday 20th May 2008

2008-05-19T17:32:00.001+10:00

Hi folks - just a reminder Andrew Stibbard will be our Guest Speaker today from 9.30 - 11.30am in the Barn. Andy will be presenting a workshop on Imagery and Typography in website mockups, which (having seen the final draft today) should tie in a number of aspects of Elke's, Genie's and my own workshops throughout last term and the current term.

Andy is an ex-BM TAFE Cert IV Webhead himself, having formally graduated (with High Distinction) only last week!! He has developed a number of websites for real clients over the years, and will be sharing his experience with the class on Tuesday.

I strongly recommend ALL current Cert IV students (whether continuing or not) attend this Guest workshop.

See you all in the morning!

PHP/MySQL - Database Normalisation

2008-05-15T20:19:00.001+10:00

For those doing the advanced PHP workshops, we discussed Database Normalisation in class today. The Wikipedia write-up does go into great detail, though you may find the articles Further Reading links to be a bit clearer.

TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG

2008-05-15T15:27:00.001+10:00

Please take the survey about the blog- your input would be highly regarded.
This may help us to resolve some of the issues about how to best use the class blog- or not, depending on survey results.
Thanks
Genie
Link for the survey is:

http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=959840

Thursday 15th May - Schedule

2008-05-14T20:03:00.001+10:00

Hi folks

As discussed on Tuesday, tomorrows schedule has been changed slightly:

9:30-11:00 - Beginners: PHP Basics - Variables, Arrays, Operators, Superglobals.
11:15-12:45 - GENIE: Feasibility/Web proposal workshop
12:45-1:15 - ALL: Team Meeting
1:15-2:00 - ALL: Lunch
2:00-5:00 - ALL: Supervised Flexible Learning
2:30-4:30 - Advanced: MySQL and PHP

ALSO, next Thursday (22nd May) I am canceling all of my workshops that day, to allow those doing the Redesign Project to complete the HTML/CSS template creation component of their project. So then, next Thursday is Supervised Flexible Learning all day (9am - 5pm).

As a result of this, Andy's Workshop is to be held next Tuesday (20th May) - 9:30-11:30/12.00am - thank you all for your feedback to Andy's mail group post.

Holiday Reading list - because we know you miss us!

2008-04-13T20:34:00.001+10:00

Hello holidaying webheads...

I have a few holiday reading links for you regarding CSS and CSS for page layout. We'll be marking up and styling a complete page over the first few weeks of Term 2, and I am also hoping to organise a few Guest speaker workshops during the term.

Containing Floats: http://www.complexspiral.com/publications/containing-floats/
Backgrounds in CSS: http://www.digital-web.com/articles/web_design_101_backgrounds/
Resetting styles before you begin:
- An Introduction: http://www.crucialwebhost.com/blog/master-stylesheet-the-most-useful-css-technique/
- My favourite CSS reset: http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/
CSS Best Practice: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/05/10/70-expert-ideas-for-better-css-coding
CSS Browser support list: http://www.westciv.com/style_master/academy/browser_support/basic_concepts.html
CSS Hacks for nasty browsers: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/browser-specific-css-hacks
Layout Gala - for lazy developers! : http://blog.html.it/layoutgala/
CSS for Print and other Media: http://www.digital-web.com/articles/css_styling_for_print_and_other_media/

And slightly more fun:

Squidfingers freebie background tiles: http://www.squidfingers.com/patterns/
Pattern4U's freebie background tiles: http://www.kollermedia.at/pattern4u/

See you all in a couple of weeks!

Team Meeting- April 10th

2008-04-09T19:38:00.001+10:00

Hello Webbies,
Here is the agenda for tomorrow's team meeting.
Thank you to Sheena and Felix. The meeting will start at 12 noon- just before lunch.
See you there!

1. Opening
2. Adopt minutes from last meeting.
3. Client Meetings – experiences of students
4. Slide show conducted by Felix.
5. Website – brief overview by Sheena
6. Selection of facilitators for next meeting in new term.
7. Close

PHP Sessions

2008-04-07T12:19:00.001+10:00

Further reading items regarding last Thursdays workshop on PHP sessions:

Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL - Sessions
- note the references to the session_register() function in this article are no longer required if using the $_SESSION super global array
Security - Session Hijacking
Security - Cross-site scripting

Tuesday 1st April - Intro CSS Workshop

2008-04-01T02:23:00.001+11:00

Today we will commence the first of a series of workshops looking at Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). We'll be covering (time permitting):

The basic syntax of CSS
Selectors
Properties
Values
CSS implementation - external, internal and inline styles
Specificity and Inheritance
The CSS media attribute - targeting CSS to a specific output (screen, print)
Validating CSS
Software to make learning/using CSS easier

From next week forth, we will be looking at a case study which I will discuss in todays workshop. It's a real website I am working on at the moment, and I am rather disturbed to say it is the first Pink website I have ever worked on (and I may never be the same again).

A few reference sites for you:

Westciv CSS Tutorial: http://www.westciv.com/style_master/academy/css_tutorial/
W3C Intro CSS Tutorial: http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/011/firstcss
Jigsaw - the W3C CSS Validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Thursday Team Meeting Agenda

2008-03-31T16:37:00.002+11:00

Here's the agenda for the team meeting on Thursday:
Note the time change- I have a new class on at 1, so we are starting early.
See you there!
Genie

Web Developers Team Meeting: 3rd April 2008- 12:00 PM

1. Open meeting- Genie
2. Minutes
3. Affinity group whip around: Tech Probs/Multi-Media Victories/Client Report backs
4. Site of the week [thanks Penny H] : http://www.subdued.net/
5. Something to think about: Genie [surprise item]
6. Meeting facilitator[s] for April 10th
7. Close

Accessibility Build Up

2008-03-26T20:32:00.003+11:00

Hiya Webbies,
Just a gentle reminder to hand in, email or share a Google Doc with me about your accessibility assessment task- preferrably tomorrow- 27th March or as soon as possible. DEFINITELY before 10th April when it is due.

The document/email should contain the following information:
1. Names of people in your group/partnership
2. The scenario you have chosen to respond to
3. A list of who will do what tasks to complete the assessment task
4. How will you prove what you have achieved? [ie: what format will your submission be in?]

The marking criteria for the Unit will be given out on Monday, which will let you know what you have to do to achieve a Pass/Competency a Credit or a Distinction- so stay tuned!

There will be time tomorrow to work on the above document. PREFERRABLY with your other team member[s]. If this is not possible, show me what you already have and we can re-negotiate another time for you.
C U 2morrow
Genie

Team Meeting: Thursday 20th March

2008-03-19T00:22:00.001+11:00

Just a reminder that this weeks Team Meeting will be less business, more social.

We will be having a communal lunch (bring something to share, I am bringing German Stritzel and REAL COFFEE !!) followed by Part II of the "fantabulous adventures of Mizz Genie in India" slideshow.

I am thinking we can do coffee and cake while we are entertained by the slideshow post-lunch.

Tuesday 18th March - Subversion Workshop

2008-03-17T01:18:00.001+11:00

NOTE: change of schedule for this weeks Tuesday workshop

We were to be looking at HTML Tables this Tuesday. However, I would like to alter this weeks schedule to look at the Subversion Version Control System (VCS) instead. We were supposed to have done this tutorial last Thursday, however the schedule has changed due to time restraints on both Tuesdays and Thursdays.

What is a VCS? It is a piece of (in Subversions case, Free and Open Source) Software that acts as a code repository where iterations of each file you add to the repository are kept, changes are logged, and allows you the ability to compare previous versions and even rollback to previous versions of each file.

Why use VCS? Quite often, people working with files will archive the current version of any given file prior to making modifications to it. Typically users append a version number or date stamp to the filename to maintain such a manual history of changes made. This is a very labour intensive, manual approach to version control, which is also fraught with error. A VCS simplifies the workflow involved, and provides the opportunity to keep a log of changes made (so that one does not need to compare two versions of a file physically to understand the changes made between them). This improves productivity. Further, where a team of people are working on one project, a VCS may allow files to be checked out and locked by individuals in the team, preventing clashing updates to files, or one person overwriting the work of another.

Why Subversion? Its free, the learning curve is not very steep, and it has a great Windows GUI (Tortoise SVN). There are also other GUI's available for those using Mac or other Unix's (such as RapidSVN). Did I say it was free? Oh, and its free...

On Tuesday we will be covering:

Installing Subversion and TortoiseSVN (on Windows)
Creating a Repository
Creating a project in a repository
Checkling the project out to create our 'working copy'
Making modifications to files in the working copy and committing them to the repository
Viewing the files change log to ascertain changes made between file versions

Understand that this is not just a coding tool. This is for anyone working with computers in just about any context, whether it be programming or design. So I strongly recommend everyone attend this workshop - Diploma students are also welcome. This is a useful tool that can save you time and headaches.

Some reading for you:

Subversion home page
Subversion Documentation - the Subversion Book
TortoiseSVN home page and Project page
RapidSVN - Home page for Mac SVN GUI
Source Control HowTo - Recommended reading prior to Tuesday

One more PHP Article...

2008-03-13T23:49:00.001+11:00

for PHP students:

Devshed: Array Manipulation with PHP4

takes arrays a bit further!

PHP Resources

2008-03-13T23:04:00.001+11:00

A few further reading links for those of you taking PHP at the moment:

Accessibility Resources

2008-03-13T20:48:00.001+11:00

A few further reading items:

REFERENCE:

REVIEWS/OPINIONS:

Team Meeting: Thursday 5 March 2008

2008-03-05T23:42:00.001+11:00

Here is the agenda for tomorrow's meeting- starting at around 2PM for around half an hour...

1. Open meeting:

2. Minutes:
- minute taker volunteer

3. Web Site Analysis/Discussion
- volunteer to suggest a website

5. Group Forum
- open discussion about any web related news, technologies, controversies etc.
- This week: Microsoft's big turn around on IE8 and standards

7. Close meeting.

Accessibility Standards - Reading list addendum

2008-03-04T22:49:00.001+11:00

Just came across this:

Why Web Accessibility Makes Sense

Please spend a bit of time reading through this over the next week.

Beginners Workshop (Tue 4 Mar 2008) - HTML Forms - extra Reading

2008-03-04T22:03:00.001+11:00

Quick reminder - we will be continuing our Forms workshop next Tuesday, where we will be looking at the remaining INPUT tag types, and the SELECT, OPTION, OPTGROUP, TEXTAREA, FIELDSET, LEGEND and BUTTON tags.

In the mean time, please continue working through the Reading material posted to the blog last Thursday - you can focus on Forms related material for now.

A few extra reading links from todays discussion:

HTTP Request Methods - Wikipedia - have a go at reading and understanding the whole article, we can have a discussion next Tuesday if anyone has any questions.
Learning to love Forms - great presentation, try building the forms presented as you step through the presentation.
The ID Attribute - making HTML unique
The CLASS Attribute - the more the merrier
Identifying CLASSes - classifying ID's

Beginners Workshop (Tue 4 Mar 2008) - HTML Forms

2008-03-04T06:55:00.001+11:00

We will be looking at how to construct HTML forms in our workshop today.

Forms allow us to collect data from a web page, data which can then be filtered:

into an email
into a database
into a file
all of the above

Forms are thus not only used for Feedback collection, but they also form the basis of work we will be doing later in regards to Dynamic Web Pages (PHP/MySQL).

The form elements comprise:

the form tag
the input tag and its numerous 'types':
1. hidden
2. text
3. password
4. radio
5. checkbox
6. submit
7. reset
8. file
9. image
the textarea tag
the label tag
the fieldset and associated legend tags
the select and associated option and optgroup tags
the button tag

Each have a number of specific attributes, some of which are essentially 'required' and others are optional.

Please refer to last weeks post (below) for further reading material.

HTML Forms, Tables and Accessibility Standards

2008-02-28T20:57:00.001+11:00

For those of you keen to move ahead, here are a few resources ahead of our upcoming workshops:

Tables and Forms:
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_tables.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/html/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_tables
http://www.usability.com.au/resources/tables.cfm
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200410/bring_on_the_tables/

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_forms.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/html/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_input
http://www.w3schools.com/html/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_inputpassword
http://www.usability.com.au/resources/forms.cfm

Accessibility Standards:
Australian government sites are required to to comply with the WAI accessibility standards. Section 508 is an American Standard for Accessibility compliance. US Government web sites are designed to comply to Section 508. The standards are similar - you can find out more about both at:

WAI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Accessibility_Initiative
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Content_Accessibility_Guidelines
http://webpublishing.agimo.gov.au/Accessibility

Section 508
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508_Amendment_to_the_Rehabilitation_Act_of_1973
http://www.section508.gov/
http://www.webaim.org/standards/508/checklist

Extra's (Tables):
http://www.webaim.org/techniques/tables/
http://www.ferg.org/section508/accessible_tables.html
http://www.jimthatcher.com/webcourse9.htm
http://www.accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/accessibility-tools/table-builder/

Extra's (Forms):
http://www.webaim.org/techniques/forms/
http://www.webaim.org/techniques/formvalidation/
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/simple-tricks-usable-forms
http://www.accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/accessibility-tools/form-builder /

Thursday 28th Feb Team Meeting Agenda

2008-02-27T17:08:00.002+11:00

Hello Webbies!

Here is the agenda for tomorrow's meeting- hopefully starting at 2PM [depending on availability of the room] and finishing at 2:30

1. Open meeting:

2. Minutes:
- minute taker volunteer
- minutes location
-sample minutes forms

3. Web Designer job of the week at My Career.com.au

http://mycareer.com.au/jobs/alexandria-2015-nsw/media-advertising-arts-entertainment/advertising-creative-services/5894195+brilliant+junior+web+graphics+designer.aspx?style=enhanced

4. Discussion and report back: To Scroll or Not to Scroll

5. Just for Fun

6. Successes and what sucks

7. Close meeting.

Beginners Workshop (Tue 26 Feb 2008) - Validating HTML documents

2008-02-26T02:31:00.001+11:00

We have taken a quick peek at the W3C HTML Validator during the past 2 weeks. Todays workshop is a closer look at HTML Validation, and how you can use a validator as a learning tool on your road to becoming a HTML guru.

Though the W3C Validator is 'the source' - so to speak, there is also another, friendlier and more convenient option available - a Firefox Extension that is built using the same software that runs behind the online W3C Validator. We will take a closer look at how to install, configure and use this extension to validate your HTML. Its like having a second set of eyes at your fingertips!

While on the topic, I am also going to point out a few other essential (and free!) Firefox extensions that I - for one (though I am not alone) - use on a daily basis:

Some links for further reading:

Why Validate? - http://validator.w3.org/docs/why.html
W3C Validator Help -http://validator.w3.org/docs/help.html
Firebug Home page (incl. Documentation) - http://www.getfirebug.com/
YSlow Homepage - http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

Team Meeting: Thursday 20 Feb

2008-02-20T18:24:00.002+11:00

Today we will be having our First Team Meeting!

Genie has arranged an Agenda for the event as follows:

Open meeting - ask for minute taker (Genie)
Explain procedures (Genie)
Web site analysis [beginners] - http://alistapart.com/(Genie/Ray/Class)
Divide into affinity groups: for the term [then we will switch]
1. Groups discuss and then a rep from each group reports back to the whole group
2. Today's discussion: How I survived the first week of Web Design
Problems encountered so far.
Light entertainment:- How Beauty is Made [a vid I have to show about using Photoshop etc]
Close

Separating content and presentation - reloaded

2008-02-19T13:16:00.002+11:00

So as I suggested in class today, take a look at the video presentation Michael blogged about last year- it nicely sums up all we discussed in class today! (Remember to do this from Home - the Firewall at TAFE blocks YouTube streams!!)

We can discuss it at our team meeting this Thursday.

Beginners Workshop (Tue 19 Feb 2008) - Semantic HTML and separating Presentation and Structure

2008-02-18T21:25:00.006+11:00

Doubtless you heard the following terms mentioned through the course of our first week, whilst we were appraising websites as a group:

messy code
clean code
web standards
structure
presentation
tag soup (? not sure if this one was mentioned, but it should have been!)
accessibility
usability

All of these concepts are, really, quite related. How? Thats a question for you to answer following todays workshop.

Today we will be looking at this beast called HTML - how it has historically been abused and misused; and why there is, today, good reason to not follow that path.

After a brief rundown on where it has come from, we'll be looking at:

the concept of Semantic HTML - or making HTML say what it means
separating Web Page Structure (HTML) from Presentation (CSS) - or, only letting HTML say what it means, not how eloquently it says it (we could also call this ensuring HTML remains speaking in a monotone...), and
how and why applying this methodology can enhance the Usability and Accessibility of your web site, improve the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of your website, and actually simplify your workload and save you time!

Welcome 2008 Semester 1 intake

2008-02-10T23:34:00.000+11:00

Welcome to all the new (and old!) web design students!

Our first day will be a fusion of introductions, fun get-to-know-you-type activities and informative stuff about the Websites course (timetables, how the course is structured etc), and if time allows we'll be getting our hands dirty with some HTML coding!

As far as the technical side of Web Design/Development goes (that's the area of the course that I'm responsible for) I usually find that people start with quite a variety of web skills. Some people start the course having never coded HTML at all (Great! You're in the right place!), whereas others come in having done quite a bit of technical web development and are keen to have their skills recognised by a qualification... and there's a broad spectrum of people in between too! Which of the following groups do you relate to the most?

I'm starting from scratch: I've barely touched HTML before (if at all) and don't really know how to use cascading style sheets... If this is you, then a great place to start is the activity What is Markup anyway? and then HTML Challenge 1 (just the first one!)
I know my way around HTML and CSS, I know what CSS classes are, and can do a few tricks with Javascript. If this is you, then it's still worth reading over What is Markup anyway? but you might choose to skip the exercises. Jump straight in with some CSS challenges (perhaps 1-3) and recap some of the more advance features of HTML and CSS using HTML Dog's advanced tutorials. You might also like to read through If only I'd known (tips for a new website) and see which tips you may not have seen before.
I'm very confident with my HTML and CSS skills, I've done quite a bit of Javascript and I've learned some PHP (or other server-side scripting language) already. I'd like to get recognition for the skills I've got and just fill in the gaps for the qualification. If this is you, then start by flicking through If only I'd known (tips for a new website) - this'll be a quick identify any gaps in your HTML/CSS skills (and maybe pick up one or two tips that you didn't know). Take some time to get an overview of the whole Cert IV Websites qualification and start getting familiar with the exact requirements for the first few units (HTML, CSS and FTP) (Yes, the qualification page on Wikiversity is currently a work in progress). I'll provide you with your first unit guide and you can start gathering your evidence to demonstrate your skills for that unit! In the mean time, you might want to flex your skills on the Javascript Challenges, PHP Challenges or XML challenges.

Hopefully you can identify with one of the above groups and get started with some activities that suit your needs. The first week or two will be a little hectic, as I try to find out exactly where everyones skills are, but soon enough we'll all be working towards short-term (1-2 week) targets for our first learning agreements!

Where's your passion - Steve Jobs

2007-11-26T13:10:00.000+11:00

I know we've got some Apple devotees is class, but whether that's you or not, we can all learn something from Steve Jobs' keynote speech to a bunch of uni students beginning their course... It goes for 15 mins and is well worth it. Hopefully a nice way that we can start thinking about where our own passion lies and the goals that we want to aim for after finishing this semister.

View Steve Jobs university address (I've got a copy for class).

Mark's Solutions

2007-11-22T10:49:00.000+11:00

Mark says there were some problems getting codes to work on Monday!

He has been busy hunting around and is very pleased to have be able to pass on the simplest solution that I can get to work.
He sends apologises and points you to the following, download the zipped Simple MP3 player from
http://www.flash-db.com/Tutorials/mp3player/
To see it work check this example.
http://unionsong.com/mp3player/

Translating your website's copy

2007-11-19T15:16:00.000+11:00

Here's an example of why you shouldn't rely on an automated translation service to translate your web site - Babbling net software sparks international incident:

Last weekend, a group of Israeli journalists used a translation engine in sending an email message to the Dutch Consulate in Tel Aviv. They wanted to discuss an upcoming visit to The Netherlands for a seminar on Dutch politics, but they ended up asking the minister several nonsensical questions about his mother.

Movember for November?

2007-11-19T13:16:00.001+11:00

I'm after some feedback for our November full-code press challenge... see November web design challenge. I've written up a problem, but haven't yet written the task:

[Fictitious] As successful as Movember is for raising money, it is currently quite a one-sided affair. Where Pink-ribbon raises money for breast cancer and anyone can be involved, purchase/wear a pink-ribbon or organise fund-raising, in Movember only the males can actively participate. There is a page on the site devoted to 'Mo sistas':
Whilst growing a Mo is left to the guys, Mo Sistas (ladies that support their guys or just love Mo's!) form an important part of Movember by recruiting Mo Bros, helping to raise funds and attending the highly anticipated Gala Partés.

Mo sistas can take part by:

Helping your Mo Bro to raise some awareness and money for men's health

Hmm. Can the females among us call out if you want to be involved as a support? The board has realised this and is actively after a way to modify the 'Movember' concept so that those who can't or don't want to grow a mo can actively participate in raising money and awareness for prostate cancer and male-depression without being reduced to a support role.

I was thinking that perhaps it would be good for a change to have a "no coding involved" challenge, since we're all getting quite good at the coding, but focus on working in our small teams to come up with a solution to the problem, and then presenting it? If you've any thoughts/suggestions/improvements to the problem (or think we should change the topic), I'd love to hear them!

Creating personas

2007-11-19T12:38:00.001+11:00

Interesting discussion on the use of Personas (ficticious characters that you create to 'personify' the target audience of your site). First there was Personas? from the creators of Basecamp, arguing that personas aren't useful:

I believe personas lead to a false sense of understanding at the deepest, most critical levels.

Then Andy Budd writes in response Personas Suck (with a lot of other people I'm sure):

Jason argues that personas aren’t real people. You can’t ask them questions and they can’t tell you when they get frustrated or when something is wrong. This is all true, but its also misdirection because this doesn’t actually have anything to do with the value of personas.

Interesting conversation - I think the main points that I picked out are:

you don't need personas if you're creating a product for yourself (or people like yourself - as the 37 Signals group does),
it's very easy to abuse personas or create crap personas
this doesn't mean that they're not useful to communicate and focus a project when you are not like your target user audience.

Deadline First, Plan Second...

2007-11-12T13:16:00.002+11:00

Another discussion on the development methodologies - on how to cope with managers who set the deadline before planning the work:

Deadline First, Plan Second describes the all-too-common phenomenon of project deadlines being set before any of the planning and estimating has been done. We’ve all been involved in or heard of such a project — the kind precipitated by a big announcement that The Next Big Thing (TM) will be delivered by March 1. Post announcement, a team is pulled together tasked with actually making it happen.

CSS Animation

2007-11-12T13:16:00.001+11:00

Has anyone got Safari (webkit) installed to try these in class (can we install it in the lab?). See CSS Animation:

The key points to understand about transitions are:
(1) They are implicit animations. Scripts and stylesheets can be written as normal, and the animations will simply happen implicitly as the properties change values.
(2) They degrade gracefully. Browsers that do not support transitions simply won’t animate, but otherwise all code and style rules can remain the same.

3 great learning strategies for web developers

2007-11-12T13:16:00.000+11:00

From 3 great learning strategies for generalists (but written for web designers/developers):

“Lifelong learning” sounds like yet another buzzword, but it is necessary to develop and to progress, and it is just great to master anyway. Mistakes are great, too, as they are an accelerating ingredient of the learning process, and this always needs to be kept in mind, especially in times where people nonsensically tend to outlaw more and more mistakes: As long as you learn from them, mistakes are cool.

Check out the article for the actual tips...

Design review: Building Cleaning services

2007-11-06T13:39:00.000+11:00

Just for a brain-side-switch, check out the recently reviewed RMS Building Services design. Now you can give a small business in your local area a snazzy site too! Or perhaps you could join Penny's team for the Mountain Youth Services Team site!

On the future of Javascript...

2007-11-06T13:29:00.000+11:00

If you're interested in the future of Javascript, Neil Mix has a great summary of the current shananigans:

Even if [MS] truly believe that what they’re doing is the right thing for the web, by forking now they’re damning the web to stalled evolution and non-interoperability for at least the next 5 years, probably longer.

Read more at The story behind ECMAScript 4 (the next version of the standard that Javascript implements).

Using multiple class selectors in CSS

2007-11-05T14:53:00.000+11:00

Russ has a new post - Using multiple classes within selectors - which has a great explanation and practical examples (a navigation menu) of CSS selectors for elements with multiple classes.

Explaining semantic markup

2007-11-05T12:18:00.000+11:00

There are some excellent examples that help to explain exactly what "semantic markup" is on the post Explaining semantic markup:

I think it’s important for a web developer to view HTML documents without any external formatting applied. That means without CSS, no JavaScript enhancement, and, if you want, no images as well; instead just the raw content. Look at it, read it through. Does it make any sense? Do you understand which parts are more important than others, which texts are headings, which parts are connected to each other?

If the answer is yes, the document is probably marked up in a nice understandable semantic fashion.

Go on to look at the example of a table-based layout compared with a semantic document! Well worth a read (found through 456BereaStreet's POSH post)

Free icon sets

2007-10-30T14:29:00.000+11:00

I was chatting with Jen about free icons that you can use in your website (for things like delete buttons, email links etc.), and remembered a set that a guy I work with found:

The set is called Silk (preview), and you can download them under a CC-share-alike license! There's one for every occasion :)

Organic Mozilla: Two sites to review

2007-10-30T13:42:00.001+11:00

Two new interesting designs found through UnmatchedStyle and StyleGala respectively:

Destination Organic - a small organic store in Queenstown, NZ. Great example of a polished design (and great Info. Architecture) for a small store.
The new Mozilla Store - buy that Firefox t-shirt or laptop carry bag... very grass-roots type design for a very far-reaching organisation!

CSS Eleven

2007-10-30T09:21:00.000+11:00

Andy's written up some thoughts of a new CSS group - ~~Oceans~~CSSEleven. The group describes itself as:

CSS Eleven is an international group of visual web designers and developers who are committed to helping the W3C's CSS Working Group to better deliver the tools that are needed to design tomorrow's web.

And here's Andy's comments:

I feel the uneasy sensation that the group doesn’t have a firm idea of how to achieve this. Lacking an agenda or manifesto and thus forging on directionless, the site becomes a rolling advertisement for the eleven’s companies, blogs & books, with wordy introductions that are unnecessary for the target audience and will probably be skipped, because honestly who wants to read eleven resumés of the self-elected?

Check out the rest of what Andy's got to say at Late-night giggles...

Grokking Google Analytics

2007-10-29T13:03:00.000+11:00

For those who are working to demonstrate the unit: Monitor traffic and compile website traffic reports, you might be interested to watch a series of tutorials over at ConversationMarketting:

To demonstrate your skills in this unit, you'll need to:

Evaluate a few different site-monitoring options - you might choose to evaluate 1 or two web-based monitoring tools (Google Analytics) and one or two hosted solutions (such as webalizer)
Set up the chosen solution to monitor a site (or sites)
Monitor your site over a period of time
Decide on the type of reports that will be most useful (or have been specified by your organisations requirements)
Generate the reports and use them to suggest improvements for your sites performance, as well as to predict when traffic will peak (if you've not got traffic peaks, you might want to discuss instead traffic peaks of a high-profile site, such as e-bay, to demonstrate your understanding)

Given the amount of documentation you're all working on at the moment, I'm happy to collect this evidence as an oral assessment (ie. we'll sit and you'll discuss your site monitoring and reports, with a few questions from me).

Good morning webbies

2007-10-29T10:13:00.000+11:00

I look forward to seeing the result of todays challenge to put together a website that showcases our campus from the range of photographs you took last week. I hope to have some hosting organized for you next week.
This is an exercise that give you an opportunity to demonstrate your team working skills along with the process of web design. Go to it!

How to evaluate a website in 30 seconds

2007-10-23T10:44:00.001+10:00

There are loads of new designs on UnmatchedStyle at the moment... I'm keen to get together for 15mins before lunch and evaluate them in 30 seconds each! Well, as a group that won't be possible but read up on How to evaluate a website in 30 seconds and we'll choose 3 and have a go!

If you like Scot's stuff on Standardzilla, you might also be interested in 7 Habits of a Hightly Successful In-house web designer.

Making a pay-pal form

2007-10-23T08:25:00.000+10:00

A few weeks ago we had a demo or creating a Paypal payment option for your site.. for those who missed it, you might want to check out Making a PayPal form tutorial (found through popular webdesign del.icio.us links):

This is a pretty neat thing to do because it’s both very simple and it’s kinda nice to be able to say “Oh yes you can pay by credit card on our website” which to most offline people sounds rather like “I am an uber-freelancer and I should be charging you six squillion dollars an hour, but you’re getting me for a steal”

PHP Forms and Google Analytics

2007-10-22T15:05:00.000+10:00

Two new articles that look very relevant for some people:

Bullet-proof contact form with PHP - By entering malicious data into our innocent contact form, hackers or spammers can fool the PHP script into doing something that you didn’t intend it to do.
Measure online advertising with Google Analytics - Google Analytics is a very powerful piece of free software — the trick is figuring out how best to use it. Luckily Justin Cutroni knows all the tricks and his article is filled with information on ad link tags, goals and how to analyze the data they create.

And, for those who vaguely understand what SQL Injection is, you might find this cartoon about SQL injection funny... (you'll have to wait til you get home to check it though).

Analysing the Web Design Survey

2007-10-22T12:41:00.001+10:00

Last week A List Apart released the results of the Web Design Survey (that some of you actually took part in from memory?):

The attached report shares everything we learned. We offer it freely to this community that has given us so much. For the curious, we also provide an “anonymized” version of the raw data. It contains every answer to every question by every respondent, excluding only personal information—no names, just the facts. Crunch it yourself and tell us what you find.

I've printed a colour copy of the PDF (80 pages) that I'm about to go down and get bound... it's an amazing set of information with things like:

Break down of salaries
Relevance of education
Perceived age/gender bias
Job satisfaction
Hours worked
Methods of staying current,
etc.

Never before has this kind of data (from over 30,000 respondants) been available... did I say I love working/teaching/learning in this field??

Andy Budd on Waterfall vs. Agile

2007-10-22T12:41:00.000+10:00

For those of you learning about development methodologies, there's another discussion currently going on around Waterfall vs. Agile... this time in the context of Deadlines (and whether it's ok to miss them). Andy Budd says in More about deadlines:

I believe that deadlines are an extremely important tool in any project. They help set expectations and provide a goal everybody can strive towards. In a perfect world no deadline would be missed and every project would be delivered on time. The waterfall style of project management attempts to replicate this perfect world by tightly controlling every step of the process. However experience shows us that projects morph over time and what was true at the start of a project, may not be true 6 months down the line. The rigidity of the “waterfall” process binds our hands and doesn’t provide the flexibility modern design projects need.

This is why agile and iterative models are gaining favour in our industry. Rather than having tightly scripted and immovable deadlines, each part of the process informs the next. Come up with a cool new feature or a better way to do something? Rather than leave this out to reach an arbitrary deadline, simply add an extra sprint. It may affect the project deadline, but the project will be better for it.

Read the whole article (and the previous one if you're keen) to get the context...

In the words of Ansel...

2007-10-22T08:41:00.000+10:00

"There are no rule for good photographs, there are only good photographs."

However there are some guide lines for consideration that can greatly assist in making your photographs more successful. Find three points in this article that you think might make a difference to your photography. Remember you will be going on excursion and can put these to the test very soon>>>>>>>

Videos of people using assistive technology

2007-10-16T13:16:00.000+10:00

Roger Johansen has posted a link to a bunch of videos of people using assistive technology.

It's a really helpful reminder for those of us who design websites of why accessibility is so important. I'm currently downloading "Everything I can't do in the real world I can do with my Mac" those interested can get together at 4:30 this arvo to take a look.

Pink Ribbon Redesign

2007-10-16T06:42:00.000+10:00

The October 3Hr FullCodePress challenge is here! Be ready to go at 9am (for 9:15 start). We'll be getting together in teams to take on the Pink Ribbon Redesign:

Redesign Problem: The current Pink Ribbon site is excellent, but your client is keen to know whether it's possible to have a design that isn't so pink - perhaps being a little more vibrant (and perhaps not so similar to White Lady Funerals).

This challenge integrates design skills, colour coordination, HTML/CSS, potentially Javascript/PHP (depending on the skills of your team) and a little information architecture! See the challenge details for more.

A jQuery tutorial

2007-10-15T13:12:00.000+10:00

For those keen Javascript coders, Digital Web Magazine has a new tutorial: jQuery Crash Course, which has some handy examples of differences between normal Javascript and jQuery:

As developers, we have more and more JavaScript libraries to choose from and, of course, the option not to use any at all. Over time, we each tend to favor one method of coding over another. For those who’d like to learn more about jQuery, one of the more popular libraries, here’s a crash course written with code-savvy web designers in mind.

Easy and beautiful forms

2007-10-15T13:11:00.000+10:00

This one came through Penny's blog.. it's called pForm - a service for creating beautifully-styled forms for free... you simply:

Choose your colour scheme,
Design your form,
Download your HTML, and, the one they forgot:
Learn from the resulting code!!!

Note: I haven't taken a look at the code yet :) Any takers?

Web accessibily in practise

2007-10-15T13:10:00.000+10:00

You might remember a discussion we had a while ago about the case of Target being taken to court by blind internet users in the US... Russ has an update in Target and accessible users for those interested:

Yesterday, a federal district court judge in California issued two landmark decisions in a nationwide class action against the Target Corporation...

(Sorry for those who've already read it... yep, I'm catching up!)

IBM and "Ease of Use"

2007-10-15T10:35:00.000+10:00

An excellent resource from IBM on Webdesign and designing your GUI

Welcome to the IBM Ease of Use Group's guidelines for creating easy-to-use Web interfaces. Achieving ease of use is essential for any site competing for business on the Web. The competition is only a couple of clicks away, and if users become dissatisfied, they can simply go elsewhere. However, by following these guidelines and using a user-centered design process, businesses can retain current customers and attract new ones.

Paper Prototyping

2007-10-15T10:14:00.000+10:00

This page offers some very low tech resources for paper protoyping. It is well worth a look and a concept that could be expand on for working with clients collaborative projects where you can eliminate drawing skills.

How could you expand on the idea?

15 Excellent examples of web typography

2007-09-25T14:52:00.000+10:00

Jesse found this one (but didn't want the rest of you to find out about it ;-) ):

I have spent the last month searching, stumbling, noting, bookmarking and analysing in a quest to find 15 Excellent examples of Web Typography. I’ve chosen them because they make excellent use of type. Some of the examples mimic the typography of print, while others actually leverage web technology, smart CSS and delicious HTML to make their pages not only aesthetically pleasing, but legible, user-friendly and easily navigable.

Learn about typograpy with excellent visual examples from someone in the know... 15 Excellent examples of web typography.

A personal request for a site review

2007-09-25T14:12:00.001+10:00

We've actually been asked to review a site - provide comments and thoughts on the design and implementation (I know we've already done this this morning for a few designs, but this time we've been asked for our thoughts and opinions - so hopefully we can spare 10-15 minutes).

Categories/headings we might want to use:

Accessibility
Information Architecture
Usability
Standards compliance

Agile vs Waterfall Advertisements!

2007-09-25T14:11:00.000+10:00

Looks like we missed the boat for creating our own AgileAdvert - a short video demonstrating the benefits of Agile development (maybe next year).

But lots of people didn't... and we can still have fun learning together from their AgileAdvert videos! My favourites are "Being Agile is our favourite thing" and "Developer Abuse" (Check the videoaudio folder if you're at TAFE).

More on Mashup's

2007-09-25T14:08:00.000+10:00

For anyone interested in watching a showcase of Mashup's, the people at Google put together Mashup Showcase for Google Developer Day 2007. A great way to get a taste of all different ways people are mashing up different web services.

I noticed one Australian site within the showcase - there may have been more - but CleanCruising uses Google Maps to display their itineraries.

Intro to programming: Get ready for a dinner party

2007-09-25T11:01:00.001+10:00

For this weeks Intro to programming challenge, we've got to program Scrappy (our robot servant) to set the table for our dinner part!

Everything you need is stacked on the bench. 8 Forks, 8 knives, 8 spoons, 8 plates and 8 glasses. Scrappy knows the seats as Seat 0, Seat 1, Seat 2, ...., Seat 7.

Here's some suggested statements:

Put .......... on ..........
Set .......... to 0
Move to seat number ..........
Get .......... from ..........
Add 1 to ..........
while .......... is less than ............
num_forks = .....

We'll get around our communal table to give it a go! (as well as spending some time seeing how we can use arrays to improve our program). Hopefully we'll have time to recap our Alice stuff too (including the basics of Object-Oriented programming).

Recruiting web designers and developers

2007-09-25T07:34:00.001+10:00

Could this be an avenue for you? It seems that a few people are starting to advertise their web design and development jobs on YouTube... check out Recruiting a web developer.

Others are even making a business out of the creation of job videos.

Spot the odd one out

2007-09-25T06:53:00.000+10:00

Can you spot the odd one out?

(All sites listed on Unmatched Style gallery)

More on SEO

2007-09-24T16:54:00.000+10:00

A new interview with an Australian search-engine-optimisation expert - Interview: Is SEO evil?

SEO is just as important as Web standards development and accessibility when developing your Web sites. Why create a Web site that works well in all browsers, can be accessed universally by all, but cannot be found efficiently, when you’re launching a new Web site, blog or business?

Read Is SEO evil for more tips...

How to cost your web project

2007-09-24T13:13:00.001+10:00

Andy Budd has authored a new Digital Web Magazine article: Contract Killers. The article is interesting as it looks at a few different options for estimating and controlling the cost of a project, including one relevante to some of us at the moment:

One way companies try to combat this is to write extremely detailed project specifications, which spell out every function and interaction possible. Once all the interactions are known, the logic goes, it’s much easier to cost a project. This is the classic IT project structure and is often known as the waterfall process. On the surface this makes a lot of sense, but look deeper and you’ll see that the problems are numerous.

The great thing is that Andy's solution, rather than being a methodology only suited to large-scale projects, is quite simple and very applicable to small projects that we might be working on!

Another Intro to Programming resource...

2007-09-24T12:14:00.000+10:00

While browsing APCMag (October edition) I came across a note about Microsoft's Beginner Developer Learning centre (see Express edition - Beginning Devolper Learning Centre). It's a resource set up to help budding developers learn how to develop websites and applications.

Of course the whole course is based around using MS tools - specifically Expression Web et al, but nonetheless it's got an excellent introduction to Javascript, and lots of introduction to programming resources such as this great tutorial on Object Oriented Design, along with lots of product specific stuff.

Worth checking out for a recap or if you're trying to get your head around some programming concepts!

MMMSnap

2007-09-24T08:55:00.000+10:00

Morning webbies - we are starting the day with a bit of a skills audit on your digital camera knowledge. If you could jump into zoomerang and do the quiz we will get started in our exploration of digital photography.

Creating login functionality with PHP

2007-09-18T08:39:00.000+10:00

Next Monday afternoon some of us will be taking part in a PHP Workshop to see how we can create a basic user login and authentication system in PHP.

Now there are lots of potential security issues to consider when rolling your own authentication system, so rather than having a 4 hour workshop next Monday, it'd be great if everyone who's planning to take part could get together and watch PHP Video tutorial: Login form (again, on YouTube but we'll have a copy in the normal spot).

The video shows how to create a basic login system, but does not consider any of the security issues (it is, after all, for beginners!). After watching the video together, perhaps people could work in groups of 2 and create the login system demo'd in the video, so that when we get together next Monday we can start from there.

Time for a Javascript re-cap!

2007-09-18T08:35:00.000+10:00

While some of us are working through our Alice activities (or starting Javascript), those of us who have already been working through the JS Challenges will get a chance to both review some of our skills as well as learn some new tricks with Javascript.

I want to try something different for this Javascript activity (paper-based spot-the-error and a Javascript code-soup puzzle): rather than going off into the call-off room, I'm going to bring 1 or 2 desks into our area so that we can float between our own work and the activity more easily. Of course, when we've all had a go, well get together as a group and chat about it!

Later on in the morning, we'll also watch Essentials of the DOM and Javascript in 10 minutes - a short video that builds upon our Javascript skills showing how we can use the Document Object Model to manipulate our pages - even creating parts of our page dynamically! So far, we've only used document.getElementById to manipulate a specific object, but this video will open up a world of opportunities!

Methods for managing large projects

2007-09-17T14:43:00.000+10:00

Just regarding our chat/discussion about project management (while we were waiting for the network to come up again... Grrr), those who are ready can start an Introduction to software development methodologies - a small research project to help you familiarise yourself with the different options!

Colin's going to get you started on Thursday with a fun activity to learn some Project Management software! Make sure you don't miss it!

Some tips from the pros

2007-09-17T11:11:00.000+10:00

If you haven't already flicked through your RSS reader (Google Reader etc.), here's a few items that look particularly relevant to us:

Ben Hunt (Web design from scratch) own thoughts on Marketing a small web design business: Some great tips like:

Don't pretend to be a big-bucks mega-corp agency, if you're not. You'll find more success being yourself, which is the real secret of branding...

The trick is to be who you are, and to portray that in a strong way that people love and connect with.

Lots more there from Ben... next up is Digital Magazine's latest WebDesign 101 tutorial - Floats, for the beginners amongst us who getting our heads around what a float actually is:

This article will introduce you to the basics of float, explain how to contain a float when the floated element is larger than the size of its container, and give you example layouts created with floats.

And the last but not least, 456BereaSt has a round up of 10 colour contrasting tools to improve the accessibility of your design:

If you publish text on a website, as most people do, I’m guessing that in almost all cases it is because you want people to read that text. So colour contrast, whether you think about it or not, is important to you, your clients, and your end users.

Workshop: Selling stuff on your website!

2007-09-17T11:09:00.000+10:00

For this week's Monday afternoon workshop we'll be discuss the different options available to us for accepting money payments from a website, before we go through the actual process together and add a payment option to one particular website (hopefully Mitchell's as he requested it!)

I'm guessing that we'll use PayPal's Web Merchant Standard option - because it's so easy to use for you and your customers.

If you're keen for a bit of background reading, checkout APCMag's Choosing the shopping cart article, which we'll discuss briefly when we start.

WebDesign Briefing...

2007-09-17T08:35:00.000+10:00

So you have been asked to build a website. How do you get the right infomation from you prospective client? Why does it matter what information you do get? Have a look at Wild Lime Media, a Cairns based Web Design company. Is this the information you might be asking for?
For more go to:

Web Events and see what they have to say on the subject.

Motive - they must be good they are kiwis

Discuss with the person beside you and we will follow up with a class discussion.

So you think you have finished your web site?

2007-09-13T06:51:00.000+10:00

This is the second part of this series.
In the discussion several weeks ago revolved around how you think that the site is complete.
One of the most common ways many developers gauge completion is the concept of "it works!" Well maybe!!

This is probably the biggest misconception in any project, and often leaves the door open to the loss of customer details, hacking, and many other things that can bring your client undone. A good story on this was the actions of a fellow who managed to obtain a list with details of customers/clients of the Health Insurance Commission (ie Medibank) several years ago and sent it to the HIC. (I will try and hunt down the details - it eventually ended in court)

The unit requirements are listed from the link at the end of this post.
Essentially the assessment task is to provide the technical specifications of the site (a written document) which ideally is completed BEFORE the site site is developed. It can always be refined along the way. Then you will have to demonstrate that the website does what you think it should (which should also match what the client wants it to do)
Grading requirements: the greater the detail (eg logic behind the functions you use) the higher the marks. No function - especially in form actions, administration type functions, etc) should be left undocumented.
Unit details: ICAA4142A Design a website to meet technical requirements

An easier way to Javascript?

2007-09-11T14:33:00.000+10:00

For this afternoon's workshop we'll be taking a look at the jQuery Javascript library and asking ourselves whether we should have been using this from the beginning! There's a new JavaScript Challenge available which goes through the jQuery intro as well for those who can't make it.

Also, time-permitting we'll take a tour of Microsoft's new 'Frontpage', called Expression Web.

A web developers desk environment...

2007-09-10T15:03:00.000+10:00

A little off-topic, but check Ben's essential desk setup for designing websites (Ben is the guy behind from Web Design from Scratch) . From My workstation: 10 essential pieces of kit:

Let me show you round my personal workstation, and show you the 10 pieces of kit that make designing web sites easier.

For myself, I want that keyboard!!

10 tips for budding web programmers and designers

2007-09-10T13:05:00.000+10:00

Check out 10 tips for budding web programmers and designers and be ready for our communal discussion this arvo! In particular, be ready to share (1) the tips you can verify from your own experience... we'll also spend some time talking through the things that we haven't heard of from this article (possibly planning later workshops).

On a different note, an overview of this afternoon's workshops:

PHP Workshop 3: Over the past two weeks we've created a basic feeback system and a page rating system, but at the request of a few people this week we'll be applying a redirecting after post design pattern to our feedback and rating apps. If we have time, we might extend them a bit too to improve their security.

Intro to programming: we'll be getting together so we can finish off last week's activity (creating flowcharts for our toast app, starting Alice) so we can continue tomorrow!

Spicy Webdesign

2007-09-10T09:48:00.000+10:00

A Graphic and webdesign business with an impressive portfolio, check it out and pick a favourite. Some great tips on how to approach getting you brief. They also have a Design Brief Guide, what do you think of it, does it ask the right questions? Is is a good idea for a webdesigner to put a guide up on their site? Leave a response on this post answe will discuss as a class.

A Post APEC MMM

2007-09-10T08:10:00.000+10:00

Good Morning Webbies - Last week you became zoomerangers - I asked you to think about a question for today. I would like you to repeat last weeks performance, maybe this time use some other types of questions or ratings. Remember the questions are to evaluate and extend learning, maybe even thought provoking.

Web 2 Ben's Hotties

2007-09-10T08:00:00.000+10:00

Check out Ben's hotties and make a list of common factors that make them work from a style perspective. Choose one that stands out for you and prepare a short presentation stating why it stands out to you. You might comment on layout, navigation, whitespace, content, effects, colour, readability, icons, metaphors and anything else that grabs you...

Team meeting Sep 4

2007-09-04T13:11:00.000+10:00

Here's a brief agenda:

Book review: Head first HTML (or you can preview Head first HTML on Google books):

"Tired of reading HTML books that only make sense after you're an expert? Then it's about time you picked up Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML and really learn HTML. You want to learn HTML so you can finally create those web pages you've always wanted, so you can communicate more effectively with friends, family, fans, and fanatic customers."

Successes (Mitch's shopping cart?) and stumbling blocks...
Job of the week: Web Developer HTML/CSS or this one: Junior/mid web developer
Design review of the week... Song pull
New articles / tutorials / resources? - HTML5 update from Andy.
Video review: Web design using a content management system.
Next week's facilitator and minute taker?

Advanced Javascript: getting started with YUI

2007-09-03T21:01:00.000+10:00

For those people who have worked their way through the Javascript Challenges and are keen to learn more, we'll get a chance to take a look at one Javascript library - Yahoo!'s User Interface library - to see how it can help us create great websites.

Javascript Challenge 9 has been added, which adds a Calendar control to a simple form so that your users don't have to type in a date but can instead just click on the date they want to enter! (Note: You'll want to have completed challenge 7 - unobtrusive Javascript - before attempting this one.)

If we get a chance, we'll also watch part of a video intro to the YUI library.

Intro to programming with Alice

2007-09-03T19:45:00.000+10:00

For those of us continuing our introduction to programming, on Tuesday we'll be recapping (and extending) our Toast algorithm as well as creating our flowchart/psuedocode that we didn't get time for last week!

Then the fun really starts... welcome to Alice's world - Learning to program with Alice gives us a visual way to see our if-statements, our while-loops and our variables in action! If we have time (which we may not in the morning), we'll have a brief demo of Alice before following some inbuilt tutorials and activities.

PHP Workshop...

2007-09-03T13:00:00.000+10:00

For this afternoons PHP workshop, we can create a page-rating system together... that is, adding functionality so that users can rate pages on your site from 1-5, and we can display the current average user rating?

If you've got other thoughts or ideas, please let me know!

What I learned from starting my own business

2007-09-03T12:55:00.000+10:00

Veerle has recently written up her own tips, What I learned from starting my own business:

People are e-mailing me with all kinds of questions. One of the recurring questions is about how I started my own business and if I could spare a few tips. In this article I’ll share my experience and what I’ve learned together with some tips and advice. Hopefully this will give people who are about to start freelancing some guidance in this big stepPublish Post.

In particular, check out what Veerle says under "Be eager to learn"...

Kodak's top Ten Photo Tips

2007-09-03T09:28:00.000+10:00

Kodak has been around for a long time. check out their Top Ten Tips in photography... Is there anything else worthwhile on the site? Might it be a good site to send clients to? leave you comments here.

Wordless and full of meaning

2007-09-03T08:57:00.000+10:00

Apart from design factors there is huge potential to use visuals to get the message across without using words. The old adage a picture speaks a thousand words is as true as it ever was.

But by carefully echoing the imagery of an ad that epitomizes our comfortably shallow consumer lifestyle, the art director does indict the complacent among us and challenge us to think about something besides our next new sweater or iPod.

Read the article and make your comment on Zeldman's blog.

Cleaner, Sharper GIF, JPEG, And PNG Images

2007-09-03T08:50:00.000+10:00

We have talked about when to use which file format in terms of graphics. In this article Thomas Rutter discusses some of the finer points of optmisation. Please read the article and leave a comment about any enlightenment that comes form it on this post.

Good Morning Webbies

2007-09-02T23:34:00.000+10:00

Last week we started class with a quiz. This week you will start the class by writing the quiz. Each of you will think about the theory we have covered and have it is best to assess your fellow students knowledge. Write your questions out and come and enter them on to Zoomerang one at a time.

Reviews for our team meeting

2007-08-28T13:16:00.000+10:00

Just got an email from one of last years students, Rob McMicking, who's put up a plethora of sites lately:

and a current work in progress:

Craig Gilchrist - Builder

Wow! If your interested to find out more about Rob, his own portfolio is Paramount Graphics.

Taking a CMS for a test-drive

2007-08-28T07:05:00.000+10:00

Last week we had a brief demo of using Wordpress as a simple Content Management System - allowing your client to update typo's, add new articles and or pages etc., without needing to call you.

But what if your client has lots of requirements, like galleries, polls, calendars, events etc., etc.. is Installing Joomla - the free Content Management System that we had a brief look at last week! This week we're going to take a look at Joomla!

We'll have a brief discussion and demo before we take it for a test-drive ourselves! To install Joomla ourselves, all we need to do is download the latest version of Joomla (we might even try the new 1.5Beta - click on Download Release), unzip it on our computers and then upload it to it's own folder on our hosting (eg: michael.learningwebdesign.net/joomla/ )! From there we can follow the onscreen installation in our browsers! (You'll need your database usernames and passwords handy!)

Once you've got your own Joomla site up and running, you might also want to print out the Joomla User manual (you can find it from the site, it's a pdf with lots of great info). If the current popular del.icio.us bookmarks for Joomla is any indication, it looks like lots of people are starting to make money just from setting up and configuring Joomla for clients!

Transfering files using the command line

2007-08-28T06:53:00.000+10:00

Note: only for those who have already been assessed on their FTP skills, and are keen to learn the distinction criteria - using FTP from the command line!

This afternoon, those who are interested can come along for a demonstration of uploading files to your website using the FTP command line. There's plenty of resources out there that will tell us all the different commands and options for FTP, but we'll only need a few:

To start using FTP from the command line, we type: ftp yoursites.name.com, where 'yoursites.name.com' is usually just the name of your own site.
You'll then be prompted for your username, then your password.
After this point, we can use the following commands:

ls - displays an abbreviated list of the files and folders on the remote computer
cd - Change Directory on the remote computer (usually where your website is)
lcd - Change directory on the local computer (usually the one sitting in front of you!)

With these three commands, we can get to the point where we're in the right directory on our local computer, and we're in the right directory on the remote computer, and we're ready to transfer some files! To transfer files we use:

put - copies a single file from the local computer to the remote computer
get - copies a single file from the remote computer to the local computer.
bye or quit - exits the FTP session.

There's also versions of these two commands for multiple files (mput and mget) if you want to copy more than one file at a time!

If you're interested, come along for the demo and see how we can upload some files onto our website using FTP

HTML Tag Soup!

2007-08-27T12:11:00.000+10:00

After quite a few weeks of HTML and CSS our heads might be swimming with HTML elements and CSS properties. This afternoon those of us new-starters will be heading off to the call-off room to play a fun game called "HTML Tag Soup" where we'll work in teams to put together a web page (HTML and CSS) on our desks - with lots of arguments in between!

I hope it's a fun way to re-enforce and integrate all the elements, properties and values that you've been swimming in for the past week!

PHP Demo Series

2007-08-27T11:54:00.000+10:00

One of the things I've been thinking about lately is my (lack-of) group workshops for continuing students lately. As most of you are in the final stages of your technical learning (PHP/MySQL), one thing that I thought might be useful is to have a weekly PHP/MySQL Demo - a demonstration of something practical that we can work through together in 1 hour (yes, it will go quite fast!)

For our first demo this afternoon, depending on your ideas and input, we could do:

Adding a feedback option to our websites (that will be stored in a database).

We'll discuss our requirements, create the form, create the database table, implement and test our solution before reviewing the pros and cons of our solution. As we will be moving quite quickly, the idea won't be to absorb everything necessarily but rather to familiarise ourselves over a period of 3-4 weeks with the process and tools for creating dynamic functionality for our websites.

Let me know if this would interest you and any other ideas you have for this series!

MMM review quiz

2007-08-27T09:00:00.000+10:00

Take the quiz to check you progress. Tod day we will also extend our croppiong exercise and look at actions and batching in photoshop. Roll up your sleeves.