Website Design - Anyone?
Many years ago, I was approached by several people, independently of one another, to assess a number of curricula for website design courses. Local colleges offered these courses either on a fulltime or part-time basis.
I found that all the curricula were, at first sight, impressive. A long list of very arcane techie-terms. Wow, I’m going to hit the ground sprinting after this course!
A closer look established that a lot of the items would either never be used by the student or would be used so very rarely - and at a high technical level - as to render them useless.
Although the bulk of the work across my desk is designing websites, I decided to offer a website design course. In this case, there would be substantial differences with the commercial courses. Firstly, the curriculum would cover the sort of stuff that would be used on a daily basis by a website designer. It would also not be restricted to ‘a’larnin’ HTML’ but also include online marketing, search optimization, criteria for assessing a website’s usabililty.
Another change would be that the tuition would not be of the ‘Open your books at Chapter 23 . . ‘ type but would be individual. Both the content and the speed of tuition would be geared to a student’s expectations, requirements and ability.
Since then, there have been students with programming backgrounds but no graphics knowledge, students with graphics background and no coding knowledge and students with neither of the foregoing. The worst of course are those with ‘I have done a bit of webdesigning and just want to brush up’. In other words, Front Page. There’s always a huge wrestle with these.
One of the most frutrating types of students, which I have all but stopped are those sent by their boss to learn how to ‘tweak’ the company website. They can’t do it of course.
There is always a demand for the course, which is good and there’s always a demand for evenings/weekends. This we don’t do. There is a limit to how much time we want to spend on the machinery. Also, the students generally come on Tuesday and Thursday mornings which gives them time to develop questions for the next session.
The latest student was of the ‘I don’t know nuthin’ about computers’ type. Brilliant!
She asked - as do others - what she might learn. The answer is always the same - “confidence”. The course gives students the confidence to attack a website project knowing where to go from the beginning. There is no meandering about trying to extract questionable resources from hither and yon.
Students are also given all the good resource websites and a disc of software and ebooks.