access4alldesign.com
Planning to go to Chicago for CMS Expo
Yes, tomorrow is Friday again, time seems goes fast when one is enjoying one's work. I am planning to go to Chicago for the CMS Expo which runs in May from the 3rd to the 5th. CMS or Web Content Management System. "At CMS Expo, you've got 3 full days of great CMS skills training for Joomla™, Drupal™ and WordPress™; plus a CMS Foundations Track and CMS PowerTrack, built to help you power-up your CMS to its maximum efficiency.".
If you are a Web Designer and want to know what the driving force behind up-to-date websites, then this is the place for you to come and polish up your web design skills to the latest knowledge. Visit the CMS Expo website by clicking on the image. I am hoping to learn about Joomla™. I have been using Wordpress™ the online blog version for a few years and have a good knowledge of that part of it but what I am really interested is the backend of Wordpress™, the PHP scripts which make it a dynamic website.
I wonder how different Joomla™ is from Wordpress™ ? I started to convert each page of this site as a .php file with a PHP include script to replace the three navigation menu's. This will make life easier so when I change something in ay of those menu's I will only have to do it once and the changes will reflect on all the pages. At the moment the PHP version of this website is on my laptop accessible through http://localhost locally but I will probably upload it tonight to this webhost.
Webhost.. oh yes, I want to thank Dave at Webhost.ie for his help, any problems are solved in a matter of hours. A better webhost does not exist!
Monday morning: St.Brigids Day!
I heard it on the radio this morning while the 84X bus was driving from Greystones to Dublin, it is St.Bridget's day today so adorn your house with the St.Bridget's Cross to ward off all kinds of evil!
Coming back to the 21st century, I made the very first online tutorial for this website.
As we will be using an 'Open source' web editor for these tutorials, the first step is to download the web editor at Notepad++ which is on the Sourceforge website. All web tutorials are under the tab 'Web Design Tutorials' in this website.
Screen capture of Video tutorial 1.
Monday morning: Back 2 work !
The 50 minute trip on the 84X is always good for a few things, falling alsleep and then waking up and scribbling a few ideas down on paper or mulling them over in my head. That is how most of my tutorials begin their life.
This website too had its beginning while walking around in Dublin or having a capucchino in 'The Muse' café on the top floor of Easons on O'Connell street. It's a great place for writing. I always have a tutorial brewing in my head and if I have no inspiration, I can still draw a few pictures like the little calendars to the left of each article.
Teaching Web Design in Ireland:
What standards do we follow?
At the moment end November 2009 as regards teaching web design in Ireland on the FETAC level there is a curriculum which is very outdated (2001) furthermore it does not adhere to the correct guidelines of the World Wide Web Consortium. This amounts to teaching a language from the Middle Ages when we clearly are in the 21 Century.
I know this might sound harsh but then I am trying to wake you up, if you are teaching web design on a FETAC level in Ireland. If you have similar misgivings about the course content and the lack of suitable teaching material, please email me at 'martine at access4alldesign.com'
Teaching Web Design 2000 - 2009
I am planning to create tutorials online covering everything from writing code, creating & manipulating images; I am also aiming to have these tutorials published in print for use in FETAC classes.
The HTML and CSS code in these tutorials will be adhering to the Guidelines of the World Web Web Consortium.
To explain how I have got to this point, I have been teaching Web Design and image manipulation since the summer of 2000. To find a Web Design manual suitable for students is difficult even with the many books written about the subject. I have never found one that explains the whole spectrum of the subject from a simple webpage to a whole fully functionning website and that follows the FETAC curriculum for 'Web Authoring C20148'. So in 2001 I decided to write my own so that my students would have a manual to work from.
The training centre where I teach in Dublin, Ireland takes on students on a continuous basis, so I have had new students starting at different times of the year. We simply have no school year as we run our courses all year. This posed a difficulty in teaching a class, so writing a manual that the students could follow at their own pace seemed the natural solution.
Today at the end of 2009, I am at my second version of the web design book for my students and in December 2009, while on a short holiday in the United States I will start on a new version which will be for publication.
My students have been asking me when would I publicise the web design book? If my manual is to be published I want it to be near to perfection, so that it contains everything that a student new to web design needs to know. This book will be the fruit of nearly six years of work.
This website will present some of the material available in the final manual version which hopefully will be published end 2010.
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