Creating Web Pages

About This Course

Create and post your very own Web site on the Internet using HTML in this extensive, hands-on, six week workshop. First, you'll learn about the capabilities of the World Wide Web and the fundamentals of web design. Then, with your instructor's patient guidance, you'll plan the content, structure and layout of your Web site, create pages full of neatly formatted text, build links between the pages and to the outside world, and add color, backgrounds, graphics, and tables. You'll also learn critical and timely information on securing the best possible location in search engine listings, and powerful no-cost or low-cost web marketing strategies.

About The Instructor

This course includes a knowledgeable and caring instructor who will guide you through your lessons, facilitate discussions, and answer your questions. The instructor for this course will be Alan Simpson.

With over 100 published books to his name, award-winning author Alan Simpson is widely regarded as a computer and Internet guru. His books have been published throughout the world in over a dozen languages. Alan is a seasoned veteran of the computer industry, and his books and online courses cover virtually all aspects of the computer industry, including Web development, operating systems, word processing, spreadsheets, databases, programming, networking, and security.

Syllabus

A new section of each course starts monthly. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

Week 1

Wednesday - Lesson 01

In this lesson, you'll get started by learning where the Web is and how it works. We'll cover some important concepts and terminology, and hopefully clear up some buzzwords you may have heard but not quite understood. Then we'll go hands-on and get started creating your first website.

Friday - Lesson 02

Today, you'll create your first Web page. You'll learn how to add tags and content to your page, view your page in a browser, reopen it in an editor to make additions and changes, save those changes, and then view the updated page in a Web browser. These skills will apply to every Web page you ever create, and they'll get you started on creating any page you can imagine.

Week 2

Wednesday - Lesson 03

In today's lesson, you'll learn to beef up your pages with the design elements that you see in most websites. We'll discuss how to add headings, paragraphs, numbered lists, and bulleted lists to your pages, and we'll also talk about the secrets to adding special characters like © and &trade. Finally, you'll discover how to add links to other peoples' pages and to other pages within your own site.

Friday - Lesson 04

Here's your chance to add some visual excitement to your website! Today, we're going to learn the basics about adding pictures to your Web pages. You'll discover how to download pictures right off the Web, and you'll also learn how to prepare and use your own pictures from a digital camera.

Week 3

Wednesday - Lesson 05

Tables are a terrific way to neatly organize content into rows and columns. You've no doubt seen tables used in other websites and countless other forms of publication. In today's lesson, you'll learn how to use HTML to create tables in your own Web pages!

Friday - Lesson 06

If you've been involved in Web development at all during the last 20 years, you may have heard about HTML, XHTML, HTML5, and CSS. If you're new to all of this, it's a confusing mess of alphabet soup. In this lesson, you'll learn the who, how, what, when, where, and why of these technologies—and what you should use now so your website is in sync with current specs and future trends.

Week 4

Wednesday - Lesson 07

Virtually all modern websites use CSS style rules for all their website styling. In today's lesson, you'll learn what a style rule is, and you'll get some hands-on practice creating your own styles rules. You'll learn how to center and align pictures and text, and you'll discover the secrets to jazzing up your site with colors (and how to choose from the millions of color options available to you).

Friday - Lesson 08

Today's lesson will introduce you to more advanced HTML and CSS topics, including how to create a page layout with a navigation bar. You'll learn how to create a page layout using div tags to put named page divisions in a Web page, and we'll discuss how to style your page divisions by adding an internal style sheet and some style rules.

Week 5

Wednesday - Lesson 09

Most websites consist of multiple pages with some common content on each page. Today's lesson will teach you to use a layout page as template so you can build multipage websites more quickly. We'll cover liquid versus fixed layouts, how design a layout, and how to easily build additional pages from your layout page. This will help you to develop more professional-looking pages using the same modern coding techniques that seasoned professionals use!

Friday - Lesson 10

Getting a site on the Internet is one thing. Getting people to notice it is quite another. In today's lesson, you'll learn about Internet directory services, search engines, Web-crawling infobots (not as creepy as they sound), and things you can do to make your own site stand out in the crowd!

Week 6

Wednesday - Lesson 11

In today's lesson, you'll learn how to publish your website for the whole world to see—well, at least anyone on the Internet. And best of all, you'll learn how to keep your site on the Internet, for free, forever!

Friday - Lesson 12

In today's lesson, you'll learn about authoring systems like Dreamweaver and Expression Web, and how they can make Web development quicker and easier. You'll also learn a couple of ways to get an online presence without creating your own website!

Requirements

Internet access, e-mail, the Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox Web browser, and the Adobe Flash and PDF plug-ins (two free and simple downloads you obtain at http://www.adobe.com/downloads by clicking Get Adobe Flash Player and Get Adobe Reader).