Sunday, November 18, 2012

Things to Consider III

Previously mentioned
Image Compression (brief review)
  • It’s time for them to put what was taught to the test. Proper selection of image formats and compression techniques are essential to a well-made website and one that loads instantly verses next week.
CSS vs. HTML formatting
  • Why and when to use them as a separate document and in document formatting, along with strengths and weaknesses.
Website snooping and or saving
  • It would be beneficial that the students know how to and understand how to find snipits of code and extract and apply them. this information can also aid them in debugging their own site if the need arises and can be preformed either in note pad (not recommended) or a full editor like Dreamweaver.

New Considerations
Standardize the work environment.
  • Establish the adobe work environment that the class will be taught in. I suggest the one called “Designer Compact” as it provides access to common menus without cluttering the screen. My work environment is also not far off from this one.
On Role Over events
  • It is possible to change images and text once a mouse is over top of it. I have seen this used to great effect before on sites and think it could prove useful to the students.
Pop Ups
  • Love them or hate them, they are handy.
Audio Embedding
  • A proper way to embed audio that doesn’t involve play back plugins using HTML5 tags.
Video Embedding
  • At least one demonstration of video embedding threw either external services or threw HTML5 tags. If tags are used, then we have to cover proper video export for playback. (two formats required for proper browser support)
Photoshop Web Slices
  • This would allow them to place legacy hotspots in images and design some more visually appealing layouts of pages. It would also allow those who are more familiar with Photoshop to do most of the design stage in Photoshop.

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Things to Consider II


Things I would like to cover in the HTML section
     Basic hand coding of HTML
Knowing how to read and write HTML at a basic level has been hugely helpful for me thought the years and has allowed me to do far more with website assignments than those that didn’t understand it. The major limitation of this though is it requires us to force the students to do the long way something that takes 2 seconds in Dream Weaver…
     Image Compression (brief review)
It’s time for them to put what was taught to the test. Proper selection of image formats and compression techniques are essential to a well-made website.
     CSS and HTML formatting
Why and when to use them as a separate document and in document formatting. Limitation of this is if we are going to be 100% Dream weaver, mainly because it will do all of the formatting on its own along with proper placement of formatting code.
     Website snooping and or saving
I feel that it would be beneficial to the students to know how to save a webpage and or look at the source code of the site. I use this regularly as a part of my site build process and to help enlighten myself to the many divergent manners of programing a site.
Potential problems
     The Program
Honestly, I have never seen a program write better HTML than a programmer. We will undoubtedly run in to instances where Dream Weaver just won’t do something. As such by hand manipulation of the code will be required.
     Web Browser
Each ones a little different in how it displays and interprets data, it would be best that we standardize the browser that we will be programing for.