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=CCT360 - Intermediate Web Design=

Instructor: Greg Smith, TA: Jeremy Fernie
__**ANNOUNCEMENT: November 15th**__
 * Take Home Quiz #2 is due today.
 * Your Document Machine assignment should be underway – you should probably be wrapping up brainstorming and moving on to development by this point. This and next week's classes will serve as work sessions. The assignmnet is due on the 29th.
 * Please refer all technical support/CSS questions to this page – email support/help requests to Greg or Jeremy will not be answered.

photo: [|Elliot Scott]
 * Week 11 & 12 | Book Building**

At this point you should be more or less completed brainstorming and have begun development of your final project (which is due in exactly two weeks). Lectures are done for the semester and the remaing lab sessions will be used for self-directed work – Jeremy and I will be available to provide feedback and direction.


 * Week 10 | Work, work work.**



Moving forward – lab sessions will be dedicated to working on the final project. So please come with mid-progress work to review and ideas to bounce off Jeremy and I. If you provide enough notice – we can try to demo functionality and help you develop workflows but we need a few days notice. Almost all of you have received your 'Damage Control' evaluation so you can start to 'clear out' one of your WordPress installs to work on the final project – although I imagine very few of you are done brainstorming yet. Speaking of the last assignment, click through the images above and inspect the above exemplary damage control assignments by Nouh Amar, Valentin Dianov, Shizra Saqib, Sami Saglam, Sadia Sharmin, Blake Lipson and Lucas Buzanic (and note the growing list here). I'll be issuing the second take home quiz tomorrow – and given your demanding November schedules, I'll allow it to be submitted via email.


 * Week 9 | Search Engine Optimization & Final Assignment Marching Orders**



This week we'll be splitting our time between a brief lecture on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), an extended introduction of the final assignment and the rest of the class will be devoted to labwork. Please ensure you submit your 'Damage Control' assignment tomorrow and shift your attention to the final assignment.

//While SEO does not figure into our coursework, anyone interested in learning about it should read [|this article] and spend some time browsing through related available plugins in the[| Plugin Directory].//


 * Week 7 |** **Architecting Social Spaces**





Everyone should have received a mark and feedback on their Apple Tart assignment – please note the stellar examples above courtesy of (from left to right) Sami Saglam, Nouh Amar, Blake Lipson, Sadia Sharmin & Kristina Waters. Right click on these files and download the HTML document to your desktop and inspect the CSS declarations and document construction – you can learn several things from each one of these submissions. Given the tight deadline on the second assignment (due next week), we'll dedicate the lion's share of this session to lab time – please engage with Jeremy and I if you need any help administrating WordPress, with general CSS queries or getting comfortable editing our pre-fab theme (and hopefully you can pull it out of its valentine-ish dark ages). We'll also take another pass at Web 2.0, by way of the media critics [|Geert Lovink], [|Ned Rossiter] & Ippolita and a few 'social space' case studies.

Some additional links related to social architecture (web services, articles, critiques etc.):

[|OpenID] [|Disqus] [|Seppukoo] (anti-social architecture) [|4chan's Chris Poole: Facebook & Google Are Doing It Wrong]


 * Week 6 |** **Visual Design for the Web**



This week we'll start to explore theming within WordPress – while we won't be building themes from the ground up, we will be taking prexisting themes and personalizing them. The Apple Tart assignment is of course due and once you've seen the second assignment I think you'll see how it serves as a 'set up' to working with CSS in the context of a WordPress theme. We will also be doing a whirlwind overview of Web 2.0 (Make sure to read the O'Reilly article) and 'visual design on the web' – which will be a quick and dirty cataloguing of the landscape of rich media publishing options within WordPress (and on the broader web). I'll also be returning the first take home quiz - the class did quite well on the exercise and the average was a 74% (please note the examples of 'strong answers' that I am gradually adding to the Quiz #1 page). Finally, given we are a bit ahead of schedule for our goals for the semester – the self-directed exercise this week is very light (it is essentially plugin/theme r&d) please spend some time working on it before next week, but ultimately your focus should be the 'Damage Control' assignment.

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 * Week 5 | Navigation, Taxonomy & Categories**

This week we finally dive into WordPress, we'll be familiarizing ourselves with some basic admin functionality and get our first experience in deploying/exploring WordPress themes. In terms of principles, we're going to discuss navigation, taxonomy & categories and do a related CSS exercise as well as an illustrative group activity. You are expected to submit your answers for your take home quiz tomorrow and please ensure to take a moment to read Cory Doctorow's article [|Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia]. FInally, please note the reference page for Cpanel & FTP access to your Wordpress install, it is expected that you'll be up and running at the start of class – also, please take a moment to change your WordPress admin and cpanel/ftp passwords to protect your site (see the previous link for instructions).

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 * Week 4 | Web Typography II**

Building on our introduction last week, we're going to be diving headlong into web type and learning about font stacks and @font-face embedding. This week also marks the moment that you guys stop being an audience and start producing work (that will be evaluated) – I'll be issuing the first take home quiz and the 'Apple Tart' assignment as well. You will draw on the readings from //Fluid Web Typography//, the exercise from last week and what we learn in class this week to execute this assignment – don't treat it lightly as it is deceptively simple and you will be held to a high standard with the evaluation of this exercise. //I'll be introducing [|Typekit] in class, some of you may want to note that tutorial video on the upper right – which shows you how to integrate the font-serving service with WordPress.//

photo: [|Feltbug]


 * Week 3 | Web Typography I**

This week we will get our hands dirty and dive into web design – focusing specifically on typography. I'll be giving a short lecture on web type, giving a CSS crash course and then we'll be doing an exercise to reacquaint (or acquaint) ourselves with CSS. By focusing on typography we can keep things simple and work on developing what I consider to be one of the most important skills within web design – cultivating a sense of how to deploy and fine-tune web type. It is important that you engage the exercise we will be doing in lab this week as it is a set-up for the first assignment (assigned/worked on next week, due on Oct. 11th). Please note that I've add a PDF from Jason Cranford Teague's //Fluid Web Typography// to the schedule page – make sure to read it through a few times over the next two weeks as it will be an invaluable reference for you. Also, Chapter 9 in //The CSS PocketGuide// is also dedicated to web type – spend some time looking it over.

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 * Week 2 | | Planning a Web Project **

This week we will take some key first steps in developing a rudimentary understanding of information architecture. We'll learn about [|wireframes], 'designing for wayfinding' and why the earliest stages of planning a website are crucial. The lecture I'll be giving on Tuesday will draw heavily from chapters 1-4 of the IA text. Given that many of you have probably not obtained the IA text yet, I have posted scans of chapter 3 and 4 (on the schedule page), I expect you will backtrack and read chapters 1 and 2 when you've got your own copy of the book/ebook. We will also be discussing Dennis G. Gerz's text [|"On the Trail of the Memex: Vannevar Bush, Weblogs and the Google Galaxy"] which dwells on Vannevar Bush's seminal 1945 //Atlantic// article [|"As We May Think"] – to get you in the mood for that conversation, I've embedded two videos on Bush/the memex above. I'll also demo the WordPress admin panel from top to bottom.



Week 1 | Welcome to CCT360!
There isn't much here yet but I'll be adding a lot of information soon. Rest assured we'll be looking under the hood of major websites (and our own) in the very near future. In the meantime, please note the course outline and schedule – available on the sidebar at the left.

We'll start working with CSS and receive a rudimentary introduction to WordPress next week.Thankfully the support staff strike should not affect our schedule as you won't //require// your own WordPress install before week five – I'll demo related functionality onscreen. In the meantime, If you are interested in setting up a WordPress test site—and I highly encourage this—you can do so via a free demo account at [|WebEnabled.com.]