Module 1: Pre-coding

Overview

In Unit 2, you begin your introduction to web design techniques. At this point in the course, you may already have ideas about what you want your web pages to look like. However, in most real-world web pages, what pages "look like" is secondary. A more important first question is: "What do I want my web page to say?" This course places an emphasis on content first, presentation second. The strength of this approach to web design is that it lends itself to designing web pages that are robust, with content that is flexible and deliverable to users regardless of which web-enabled technologies or configurations they're using. The creed among web developers who practice this approach, and among standards organizations who promote it, is that content and structure should be separate from presentation. In this course, Unit 2 will focus on content and structure using HTML. Later, in Unit 3, we will turn our attention to presentation using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

In this module, you will construct a website that will serve as a portfolio for displaying the work you complete in this course. This portfolio will continue to play a key role throughout the course.

Also, you will be introduced to the planning steps (called pre-coding) that you need to go through before you begin working with the nuts and bolts of coding your website using HTML. Just as there are pre-writing steps that ought to be done prior to writing an essay, there are pre-coding steps to do before coding a website.

Lessons