CS 318: Lab 9 – Fixed Positioning
Dear students, Today we begin our exploration of the several ways to break away from the normal left-to-right, top-to-bottom flow of a web page. We started with fixed positioning, because it introduces the ideas of anchoring outside the hierarchy. In fact, fixed position effectively removes an element entirely from its natural position in the hierachy […]
CS 318: Lab 8 – Horizontal Alignment and Gradients
Dear students, Today, we will continue to explore the box model—because we need to. The vast majority of our difficulties with designing for the web will involve alignment and positioning. Suppose you want to horizontally center an element. What must be true? It must be a block element. Centering doesn’t make sense for phrase elements. […]
CS 318: Lab 7 – Box Model
Dear students, Let’s stop a moment to reflect upon what we have done so far this semester: We’ve organized information in a hierarchy and represented it in plain old text. We’ve seen how to make our text “hyper” through the use of images and links. We’ve added style to established elements of this hierarchy. We’ve […]
CS 318: Project Site Test and Sitemap – due on March 5
Your next task in the semester project comes in two pieces: Conduct user studies on several existing websites similar to the one you will design. Compose a sitemap to describe the overall architecture of your site. We describe each of these in turn. Task 1: Comparable Site Test Identify and familiarize yourself with three existing websites […]
CS 318: Lab 6 – Divs, Spans, IDs, and Classes
Dear students, Last time we dropped into the world of CSS as a means of applying style to our information hierarchies. Learning CSS is a little like learning how to conjure springtime. You suddenly have the power to make things bloom and look beautiful. But it will take a lot of practice. This class spins […]
CS 318: WordPress for February
A lot of the world saves time and energy by using a content management system (CMS). These systems allow users that don’t know much about HTML and CSS to still produce beautiful websites. The most frequently used CMS is WordPress, which is responsible for 30% of the web. It accounts for 60% of the CMS […]
CS 318: Lab 5 – Hello, CSS
Dear students, Today we begin integrating cascading style sheets (CSS) into our pages. When we use an editor like Microsoft Word or Adobe InDesign, we are often thinking about two things at once: the information we wish to communicate and its presentation. For several reasons, mixing these is a bad idea: We get hung up […]
CS 318: Lab 4 – Structuring Elements
Dear students, Today we will branch out from our 1-page sites. To connect our pages to other pages, we will make extensive use of the anchor element, whose tag is a. Its href attribute contains a URL to another page, much like img‘s src attribute contains a URL to an image. Consider this example: There's […]
CS 318: Lab 3 – More Core
Dear students, Let’s start with a quick informal reading quiz: Question 1 What’s a phrase element? Question 2 What happens to whitespace in our HTML files? Question 3 What kind of list elements are available? When I think about my favorite and most memorable learning experiences, my high school Spanish classes immediately come to mind. […]
CS 318: Project Proposal – due on February 14
In this class, you are asked to apply what you’re learning by building a website for a client. The project is broken down into a series of milestones. The first milestone is to find a client and formally propose your project. Complete the following tasks to achieve this milestone. Task 1: Choose a Client Find […]