Posts under ‘Weekly Updates’

This post will be my final update to the class website, and it will be short and sweet: On Tuesday, I’ll be meeting with each team to review your Final Project website. When you come to your conference, be prepared to show me your entire site and discuss how the site has changed since we [...]

Welcome back from Thanksgiving break! I hope everyone had a nice week off. I spent most of the week sick in bed, but I did manage to finish grading your usability projects (if you haven’t received my feedback via email, please let me know) and your second exams (you’ll get these back in class on [...]

By now you should have received feedback from me on your Final Project Proposal draft. (If you haven’t, please let me know!) The final version of your proposal is due next Thursday, November 20th, at the beginning of class. Please refer to the assignment sheet for submission instructions. On Tuesday, we will have our second [...]

I apologize for the late update this week. I’ve been busy planning and running a conference that our department hosted on Friday and Saturday, and I’m just now (late Sunday night) catching up on the long list of things I should have been doing over the past few days. Because of my tardiness, I have [...]

I’m headed to the airport in a few hours and I still haven’t packed my suitcase, so this update will be short and sweet. Next week we will finish up the Usability Report assignment, which is due on Thursday. Bring a rough draft of your report to class on Tuesday (in HTML format) so we [...]

Based on our class discussions in Week 9, I gather that most of you are on track with your Usability Report projects. By Tuesday of Week 10, you should have completed all of your usability tests; this will allow you to spend the following week writing up your results and creating protoypes to include in [...]

A few quick notes about wrapping up Week 8: By now, you should have submitted your final usability testing plan to me. If you haven’t, please do so as quickly as possible. I will review your plan and give you approval to begin conducting your usability tests with Real Live Humans (TM). Between now and [...]

Week 7 was incredibly busy and stressful for all of us. Somehow, you managed to submit your Zen Garden projects and study for our first exam. I’m sure it must feel good to have both of these hurdles behind you. As I said in class after the midterm, I found it incredibly invigorating to watch [...]

As I’ve watched you create and debug (and sometimes scrap and re-create) your CSS Zen Garden designs, I’ve been impressed with the variety of visual styles you’re using. Just think–five weeks ago, most of you had never used cascading style sheets, and now you’ve created entirely original designs using only CSS and images. I can’t [...]

Next week we’ll be in the home stretch for the CSS Zen Garden Redesign assignment. By Tuesday you should have a solid draft of your design that you are willing to share with your peers in class. Before you come to class on Tuesday, upload your design to a directory named “zengarden” on your public [...]

I think our in-class workshop on Thursday showed us two things: 1) The CSS Zen Garden Redesign assignment has the potential to yield some incredibly creative website designs. 2) It’s going to take a lot of work to create compelling designs from scratch. I hope week 5 will provide you with the tools and the [...]

Week 4 will mark the end of our first assignment and the start of our next big project: the CSS Zen Garden Redesign. In addition, we will learn how color works on the web, how to optimize graphics for the web, and how to use Photoshop to accomplish these tasks. Before you come to class [...]

During Week 3, we will continue to work on the Online Résumé assignment, move from CSS styling to CSS positioning, and introduce our next assignment: the CSS Zen Garden Redesign. On Tuesday, we will briefly review the reading assignments for the day (see the calendar for details), then spend most of the class period in [...]

Next week in class we will begin exploring cascading style sheets, web typography, and the ever-evolving “personal website.” Please review the class calendar for specific reading assignments. Here are the highlights: On Tuesday, we’ll talk about using inline styles to change fonts, spacing, colors, etc., on your homepages. We will also work on converting Word [...]