Web Design: Developing a Web Site

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Course Overview

The Internet and the Web have revolutionised the way people communicate and organisations do business. Today's environment demands that computer professionals know how to establish and maintain a Web site.

In this hands-on course, you gain the knowledge you need to develop a well-designed Web site. You learn the fundamentals of HTML syntax and layout, creating effective Web pages, configuring a Web server and interfacing your Web site to databases.

Audience

This course is valuable for those involved in establishing, developing or maintaining a Web site. A basic familiarity with Microsoft Windows, the Internet and the Web is helpful.

Skills Gained

• Establish, configure and maintain an intranet or Internet Web site
• Develop and publish Web pages using HyperText Markup Language (HTML)
• Create image maps to allow easy navigation of your Web site
• Configure a Web server
• Capture, retrieve and display information via a database
• Produce dynamic Web pages using server-side and client-side scripts

Course Outline

Introduction to the Web

• Internet/intranet fundamentals
• Web architecture
• Comparing capabilities and examining multiple browsers

HTML: HyperText Markup Language

Building a Web page with HTML and XHTML

• Head and body elements
• Formatting text with tags
• Establishing hypertext links
• Ordered and unordered lists
• Applying background colours and patterns
• Setting text fonts, colours and styles
• Defining relative and absolute anchors

Adding graphic elements

• Making your pages graphical with embedded images
• Adding interactivity with "clickable" images
• Utilising animated images to liven up a Web page
• Creating navigational toolbars using image maps

Enhancing a Web page using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

• Attaching style properties to HTML tags
• Creating and applying style sheets
• Leveraging colour, fonts and positioning to improve page appearance

Implementing a Web Server

Web server functionality

• Web server/browser communication
• The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
• Freeware vs. commercial servers

Configuring a Web server

• Setting up the server directory structure
• Deploying access configuration/security
• Ongoing server administration

Programming on the Server

Server-side scripting

• Client/server/script interaction
• How server programs operate: GETand POST
• Accessing environment variables
• Server-side processing: CGI, ASP, PHP, JSP
• Locating scripts you can reuse
• Reading and writing browser cookies

Processing user data with forms

• Capturing user input with HTML forms
• Adding text fields, selection lists, check boxes and radio buttons to a Web page
• Enabling "submit" and "reset" buttons to activate a form
• Processing form input with Active Server Pages (ASP) and PHP

Interfacing to a Database

Relational databases and the Web

• Defining a database and its records
• Using SQL to manipulate the database
• Creating Web pages to insert, delete and update records

Connecting Web pages to databases

• Inserting and retrieving data with ASP and PHP
• Embedding queries in Web pages

Creating Dynamic Web Pages

Adding special effects

• Controlling the presentation of a document with CSS
• Adding Java applets to your Web site
• Enhancing functionality using JavaScript

Incorporating multimedia

• Streaming audio and video
• Adding interactivity with plug-ins: Shockwave, Flash

Creating interactive Web pages with Dynamic HTML (DHTML)

• Combining JavaScript and CSS
• Supporting multiple browsers

XML and XHTML

• Designing new tag sets with XML
• Improving your Web site's ranking within search engines

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