Build Your Website 1
I enrolled onto the Build Your Website 1 course with LVS with a little trepidation and loads of enthusiasm and excitement – yes, I will be able to build a website sometime in the future…..
Week 1
The day of the first lesson finally dawned, and I strolled into class with my head held high and a huge smile on my face. The first thing I noticed was the .pdf file was 52 pages long – the smile diminished a little – that’s a lot of reading!
We learned about HTML tags, tag sets, empty tags and validating – oh yes, validating – both the best and the worst possible part of compiling a web page – and who’s idea was validation!!!
Week 2
After week 1, this was bound to be a breeze – wrong!
We delved into the mysteries of basic CSS – selectors and combined selectors. We entered the maze that is hexidecimal colour coding. We read for the very first time the word "inheritance" – believe me, it may have been the first time, but was by no means going to be the last! We learnt about inserting special characters and about navigating away from and back to our web page using links and anchor tags. Oh yes, of course there is a validation service for CSS styling and one for validating links – and why wouldn’t there be???
Week 3
In this lesson we tiptoed through the minefields of font properties and text properties – not much to take in here, the font properties consist of: family/style/weight/variant/size and the text properties are: align/decoration/transform – no, not much to take in!!
I really enjoyed learning about pseudo classes and how you are able to make links change colour when you hover the cursor over them and during and after clicking on them – that’s the kind of thing I enrolled on this course for – I felt so very clever after styling my first links!
Only mentioned twice in this lesson I think: "Inheritance". Don’t forget Validation, Validation, Validation.
Week 4
Images – right, I was dreading this one – many of the students may have been looking forward to the use of images on their pages, but it gave me a serious headache – what subject can I write about that will lend itself to the use of all the elements required for this lesson? About 6 subjects were considered and rejected until I finally decided upon a simple text tutorial for Paint Shop Pro. We learnt about using thumbnails and images for backgrounds and how to tile the background image.
We also learnt the use of classes and div and span tags – which gave us so much more freedom of styling the pages – what a revelation!
Here is where I am including the explanation of the difference between selectors and classes: A selector sets the properties for a specific element and is set within the style tags, and those properties will apply in every instance of that element on the page. A class is set within the style tags, but it changes only the part or parts of the element to which it is applied which is specified within block-level tags.
Inheritance, Validation!!!
Week 5
Oh my God – margins and padding – help!!!! This class taught us the ability to style the page with much more flair, but the maths and logic involved made it a veritable nightmare!! How many times do you have to adjust your margins and padding sizes to get the results you want????
Tables – yup! Ok, so I won’t be using them a lot in any web pages I may build in the future if I can possibly avoid it – and to think – the last web page I built about 10 years ago was just one great big, confusing table!
Inheritance, Validation!!!
Week 6
So I got here – how? I’m not quite sure, sometimes I feel as though I have cheated my way here, but then no, I did write the previous pages, and I do know a lot more than I did before I started the course. So am I looking forward to Build 2? Loaded question!! Part of me says "Bring it on" and the other part of me says "Noooooo, don’t do it" After these 6 lessons, I realise it can only get harder!!
Inheritance, Validation!!!
And finally...
All joking aside, my thanks go to Deb Hoffmann and LVS for this great course. Deb has been so very helpful and encouraging and I’m not too sure that I would have got to this point without her support.
