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Successful web design and development requires a wide range of skills in multiple scripting languages, software applications, and methodologies. Author Rick Martin brings all of these together in one course to guide you through HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, Adobe Photoshop, and the processes involved in planning a successful website project. At the end of the course, you will be comfortable with developing functional, standards-compliant websites. Work files are included. To begin learning today, simply click on the movie links below.
Hello, and welcome to the Virtual Training Company's Web Design and Development Essentials training course. My name is Rick. This course is a little bit different than some you might come across. Instead of teaching you just one piece of software or programming language, I'm going to teach you a wide range of skills to accomplish a goal and that is the ability to build a clean, functional website. You can then take what you've learned and build your own website or you can use this course as a starting point towards a career in web design and development. We're not going to be focusing on flashy, show-off websites primarily because that's not what actually gets things done in the World Wide Web. The vast majority of web users just prefer a clean, intuitive and highly usable website. In this course I'm going to show you how to create functional, simple websites using the tools most commonly used in the industry. We'll start with preparation and setup, website hosting, and a discussion of the software applications and programming languages that we're going to use. I'll then demonstrate the most common uses of each of these tools and languages. HTML XHTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL Databases, and JavaScript. We'll then cover the most important part of web design and development - planning your website. Then we'll spend a little bit of time with Adobe Photoshop to create the basic visual appearance of a simple website. We'll then create some navigation menus and finally finish up by assembling the layout for a working web page. Throughout this course I'll be using a fairly large number of files to demonstrate concepts and techniques. At times I'll mention that a particular file is in the Work Files, but even if I don't, most of the files that I'll use during this course are actually in there as well. Check the file name during a particular lesson and if it seems to me that you'll benefit from the inclusion of a particular file you'll find it in the Work Files. I've actually included a few extra files that I don't use during this course as well. These files are in there for you to examine and gain a bit of extra learning from. OK, this course is not intended to teach you everything about all of the techniques and scripting languages used in all areas of web design and development. That would take way more time than what we have available here. Instead, this course will teach you what you need to know to build reliable functional websites without having to use extra design tools like Web Page Editors. Many of these editors might work fine and seem really easy, but they don't encourage understanding of what you're actually doing and why we need to do certain things in certain ways. If you'd like to know more about the subjects that we're about to cover, VTC has many full courses that cover in depth each of the languages and applications that we're going to be using in this course and we have more coming out in the future. I encourage you to check out these courses and use them to continue your learning. Now for a little disclaimer. There are often alternative ways to do many of the things I'm going to show you in this course. Many of these alternative methods work just as well as mine. Some aspects of programming are a little bit like building a house. You can build a house almost any way you'd like, as long as you know what the rules are first and you make sure that you always follow them. After this course I encourage you to go out and explore these alternative methods. Be open-minded and always receptive to other ways of thinking and see what works best for you. This will be particularly important if you end up working as part of a development team. Most DEV teams have established common practices that all members need to follow. This is usually so the work can be shared between multiple people. One team member can pick up some work that another member has already worked on and quickly keep the ball rolling without needing to decipher the original member's programming code first. And finally, at the time of this recording the new version of HTML, Version 5, is receiving a lot of publicity. At present, the HTML 5 specification is still in development, so in this course I'm concentrating on more traditional methods to give you a strong grounding in web design and development. HTML 5 is bringing some exciting new things with it so I do encourage you, after you complete this course, to learn as much as you can about it. By that time, VTC will likely have a complete HTML 5 course in the works if not already completed. Alright, let's move on to the next lesson and get started.