Technology. Journalism. Tea

I’m not a web designer. I don’t pretend to be. But more and more I end up doing design as part of my projects, and I hate it!

I’m what some call a front-end developer, and what that means is that I can take a website concept, requirement and design and turn it into a functioning website. This might involve working out the best system (WordPress, Drupal, plain old html) and configuring it to suit needs. Then, taking a Photoshop design and cutting it up into bits, building a html and css frame and fitting the images into it. Continue reading “Design woes” »

I’m involved in teaching MA web journalism students how to make websites. The aim of the initial module is for the students to build a simple website of five or six pages using simple html, pictures, audio and video. In the second semester they build a bigger group website, then go on to do a web portfolio site.

In the past I’ve  taught the students  Dreamweaver with a bit of photoshop. This was ok in the days when layout tables were acceptable, but trying to teach css layout using Dreamweaver (in layout view!) is near impossible. It’s fiddly, annoying and certainly not WYSIWYG! And in the last year I made a real effort to emphasise code view and how important it really is. I was suprised at how many students actually got it!

So now my new approach is this: Ditch Dreamweaver and write some code! Continue reading “Approaches to teaching web building” »