Web Design   

This self-guided course will teach you the basics of working with color in web design.

Color plays an important role in visual communication, especially when designing websites. For web designers, understanding color theory is a key to creating a color palette for UI/UX projects. This self-guided course will teach you the fundamentals of color theory and how to apply this framework to your web design practice.

What you will learn

• About the traditional color wheel and explore color in Adobe Illustrator
• About relationships between colors and how to create a color "feel"
• Basic color theory principles
• About considerations for print and web
• To create a color palette for your project

How you will benefit

• Master the basics color theory in a completely online environment
• Expand your web design skills to UI/UX
• Perfect your use of color in your design projects

Requirements:

Hardware Requirements:

• This course can be taken on either a PC or Mac.

Software Requirements:

• PC: Windows 10 or later.
• Mac: macOS 11.0 or later.
• Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox are preferred. Microsoft Edge and Safari are also compatible.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader.
• Software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins.

Other:

• Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.

Recommended: Though they are not strictly required, you will get the most out of this course if you have Adobe Photoshop and/or Adobe Illustrator installed on your computer. These tools are not included with the course.

• Adobe Photoshop (not included in enrollment)
• Adobe Illustrator (not included in enrollment)

Instructional Material Requirements:

The instructional materials required for this course are included in enrollment and will be available online.

1. Terminology
   1. Color Wheel
   2. Explore a Live Color Wheel
   3. Saturation, Hues and Shades
   4. Exploring Shades and Tints Using Adobe Illustrator
   5. Value of the Hue
   6. Explore a Color Using Photoshop
   7. Color Scheme
2. Building an Efficient Color Theme
1. Triadic Colors
2. Complementary Colors
3. Split Colors
4. Analogous Colors
5. Color Moods
6. Work with Client Color Plans
7. Medium Types
3. Color Theory Principles
1. Complementary Colors
2. Contrasting
3. Vibrancy
4. Monochromatic
5. Work with Color Principles
4. Color Context
1. Mode RGB/CMYK
2. Print or Screen
3. Audience Type
4. Choose Colors for Different Audience Types
5. Scope of Project
5. Implementing Color
1. Create Color Palette
2. Mechanics of a Color Scheme
3. Whitespace
4. Creating an Electronic Color Scheme

Learn how to create websites with WordPress, the world's most popular website building platform.

Learn how to create attractive, sophisticated blogs and websites—without any coding! WordPress is the world's most popular content management system, powering more than 40 percent of all sites on the Internet. WordPress is an easy-to-use solution that will help you put your site on the web in far less time than by coding, and at a much lower cost than hiring a professional.

In these lessons, you'll get hands-on experience with this powerful tool as you create your own WordPress.org site and blog. You'll find out how to use WordPress to create pages and posts, add images and videos, change a site's look and feel, and include user-friendly features. You'll discover the ease of using WordPress design themes to express your creativity, and you'll see how much fun it is to be part of the vibrant WordPress online community.

In addition to mastering the technical elements of WordPress, you'll learn how to organize a blog or website, create appealing content, keep your site secure, and achieve better positions on search engine results pages. By the end of this course, you'll be able to confidently use WordPress to create a blog or a personal, business, or organizational website.

The WordPress.org version covered in this class is the platform the pros use. To set up a practice site for this class, you will need to sign up for a hosting account. Several options are described in the first lesson. WordPress itself is free, but it needs to be hosted in the cloud.

Requirements:

Hardware Requirements:

• This course can be taken on either a PC, Mac, or Chromebook.

Software Requirements:

• PC: Windows 8 or later.
• Mac: macOS 10.6 or later.
• Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox are preferred. Microsoft Edge and Safari are also compatible.
• WordPress.org requires a paid hosting account. You'll receive instructions on how to sign up for an account.

Other:

• Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.

Instructional Material Requirements:

The instructional materials required for this course are included in enrollment and will be available online.

Getting Started With WordPress

This first lesson explores the magic of WordPress! You'll discover how to use this WordPress to create an attractive, dynamic blog or website—without needing to learn any special code. You'll find out what the two "flavors" of WordPress are and why most experts recommend the WordPress.org version we will use in this course. Then you'll go online, sign up for a hosting account, and tour the WordPress Dashboard.

Creating a Blog

What can a blog do that a website can't? Blogging's become a popular way to establish an online presence. This lesson focuses on how adding a blog can make a traditional website more effective. Then you'll build a blog with WordPress—by creating, refining, and categorizing posts. You'll also find out how to encourage and control visitor feedback.

Making a WordPress Website

Get the best of both worlds by combining a blog with a traditional website. In this lesson, you'll use WordPress to create and organize Web pages. And you will learn how to convert your blog to a traditional website—or vice versa—with the click of a button.

Making Your Pages Look Great

This lesson's all about WordPress themes—the templates that give your website its look and feel. You'll discover how to choose a theme, install it, and tweak it.

Working With Images and Multimedia

Photos, drawings, charts, videos, and audio clips can make your website more appealing and understandable. This lesson teaches you how to use WordPress to upload and insert images and multimedia files.

Plugins: The Modular Solution for Functional Websites

Plugins are little programs that add features to your WordPress website. In this lesson, you'll learn how to find and use them.

Making a User-Friendly Website

If your online visitors have trouble understanding or navigating your website, they'll go somewhere else. This lesson helps you pinpoint and eliminate usability problems.

Polishing Your WordPress Website

This lesson takes a long, hard look at your class project and how to make it better. You'll create a front page featuring both static and dynamic content; add links to pages, documents, email, and other sites; and repair typos, grammatical errors, and other mistakes.

Getting Search Engines to Love Your Website

What if you launched a website and nobody came? This lesson will show you how to keep that from happening. You'll find out what makes search engines tick and how to get them to visit your pages.

Making the Most of Statistics and Social Networking

Statistics are just a bunch of numbers if you don't know how to use them. This lesson focuses on how to analyze stats so you can improve your site. You'll also find out how to tie your WordPress pages into social sites like Facebook and Twitter.

WordPress Security and Monetization

This lesson will teach you how to protect a WordPress site against hackers and reviews money-making strategies for blogs and websites.

Mastering Your Domains

In the final lesson, you will take a tour of the hosting control panel, discuss domain naming strategies, and review where to get help after the course ends.

Learn powerful graphic design techniques and build websites that are both attractive and wickedly effective.

These days, creating a website is so easy almost anyone can do it. But with all the competition on the web, creating a site that's effective is more challenging than ever. Regardless of your current skills or level of knowledge, in this course you'll master the basics of web design and learn how to build sites that are better and more effective.

You'll examine the tension between form and function, explore the six major states of the website development process, and learn the basics of user-centered design. You'll also cover the five basic steps to organizing information, find out how site design themes can be used for information delivery, and review website design considerations. Along the way, you'll learn about effective type and graphics and explore the idea of web 2.0. This course is a must for web designers, giving the tips and tools that will help them establish a solid career.

Requirements:

Hardware Requirements:

• This course can be taken on either a PC or Mac.

Software Requirements:

• PC: Windows 8 or later.
• Mac: macOS 10.6 or later.
• Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox are preferred. Microsoft Edge and Safari are also compatible.
• An imaging program, such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, is recommended (not included in enrollment).
• A web page authoring tool, such as Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression Web, is recommended (not included in enrollment).
• Adobe Acrobat Reader.
• Software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins.

Other:

• Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.

Instructional Material Requirements:

The instructional materials required for this course are included in enrollment and will be available online.

Form Versus Function

This course is different from most web creation courses you'll find because it's not designed to teach you the mechanics of creating a web page or how to use a particular software program. Instead, it's designed to help you take your website creations to the next level by enhancing both design and functionality. You'll discover what attracts visitors to a website, and how to use design tools such as typography, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and multimedia to captivate visitors and keep them coming back.

Website Planning Process

Visitors are attracted by good design, but content is what keeps them at the site longer and motivates them to return. Learn how to use two tools to attract and retain visitors: design critiques and a content inventory. Explore the six major development stages that yield expert design and smart content. Then study the three parts of web design and the skills you'll need for each.

Interface Design

By now, you probably understand that an interface is the screen visitors see and use when they visit any page of your site. Designing an interface is easy. Designing an effective interface, however, is more challenging. There are four main elements that you'll need to consider to make your site user-centric: usability, visualization, functionality, and accessibility. Explore each of these elements to see the thought that goes into effective interface design.

Site Structure

Even if your basic content is accurate, attractive, and well written, your site won't function well without a solid and logical organizational foundation. Review the five basic steps involved in organizing information and four essential structures that you can use to build a website. Then learn how to create a flowchart for the pages you want to include on your site.

Site Design

Websites exist to inform, educate, persuade, or entertain. Take this opportunity to concentrate on site design themes that pay attention to information delivery. Learn how to organize elements in order to enable visitors to accomplish their own goals. Explore usability, content, and design.

Page Design

Discover how you can use visual and graphic design, page layout, and grids to take your designs to the next level. At the same time, become familiar with design considerations like visual hierarchy, page dimensions, and white space.

Typography on the Web

Typography plays a dual role by providing both verbal and visual communication. Almost any type of font will do to transmit information to others. But to convey the right type of mood along with the information takes a special type and color of font. Learn all the secrets here!

CSS and Font Embedding

Find out how you can use Cascading Style Sheets to modify fonts. Become familiar with inline, document-level, and external (linked) style sheets, and learn how to create an external CSS file to control the formatting of any or all pages on your site. You'll also take a look at some early font embedding techniques and explore two popular Flash-related options currently in use.

Writing for the Web

Before you write for the web, you should take the time to understand how people read online. Become familiar with the use of titles, headlines, and subheads to assist readers in navigating your site. Discover the advantages of using a web content management system. Learn how you can communicate more easily and informally with web visitors by adding a blog to your site.

Images, Colors, and Layers

You can use images to add interest to your site and to help with navigation. Early designers were limited graphically by HTML attributes, and later designers discovered they could use tables to place images. Today's designers also have the option of using CSS to position images on the screen. But believe it or not, many people still use text-based browsers. So, you'll learn how to make the information you convey through your images accessible to those individuals as well.

CSS Positioning: More Layers

The combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript allows you to create intensely interactive web applications similar to any game or presentation built with traditional programming languages. This interaction of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is known as Dynamic HTML or DHTML. Become familiar with the basics of DHTML, including code you can use to enhance your designs by adding layers to your pages.

Web 2.0 and Beyond

Early websites were created by a few to be read by many. Over the years, developers added interactivity to websites through discussion forums, chat rooms, and shopping carts. These features are part of what might be called "web 1.0". Today the focus has shifted from the sponsor of the site to the visitor, and sites like Flickr and YouTube are popular. They're examples of web 2.0 sites. Examine several popular web 2.0 sites, and take a look ahead to web 3.0.

Learn how to build unique WordPress sites where visitors can respond to messages, fill out forms, buy products, make appointments, and much more.

Take your WordPress site to the next level! This online course will teach you how to optimize your site for a great user experience. You'll learn how to easily add CSS to fine-tune your site's appearance and discover how to add important functionality with the best WordPress plugins. Master the tools and skills needed to get the most out of WordPress in six weeks with Intermediate WordPress Websites.

Requirements:

Hardware Requirements:

• This course can be taken on either a PC, Mac, or Chromebook.

Software Requirements:

• PC: Windows 8 or later.
• Mac: macOS 10.6 or later.
• Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge are preferred. Mozilla Firefox and Safari are also compatible.
• WordPress.org software is free, but to use it, you must install it on a paid account with a hosting service, which costs approximately $5 to $20 a month (usually quite a bit less for the first year's "introductory" price). The course will explain how to sign up with a host. Many hosts offer a 30-day money-back guarantee if you decide this isn't for you.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Other:

• Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.

Instructional Material Requirements:

The instructional materials required for this course are included in enrollment and will be available online.

Setting Up Your WordPress Website

In this first lesson, you'll create a practice website by finding the best hosting service for your site, then installing a free version of WordPress.org. You'll understand the concept of domains and subdomains, then you'll learn how to work with utilities in the host's cPanel. You'll also tour the WordPress dashboard to get an overview of the administrative tools WordPress offers. Then you'll install the classic WordPress editor where you'll build and modify your practice site's pages.

Planning and Organizing Your Website

Now that you've set up your brand-new WordPress practice site, you're ready to dive in and explore the WordPress back end, and also to begin building and modifying your site. You'll start by doing some pre-planning, creating an outline of your site before adding text or images. This can help you build an organic website, where the components harmonize and serve the site's overall purpose. Then you'll conclude by touring the WordPress administrative area (back end), where you'll configure your website and add content.

Working with Themes

This lesson covers every aspect of WordPress themes—how they work, where to find them, what to look for, how to ensure site security, and how to install them. You'll then begin working on your practice website! You'll look at various themes in order to pick one that will best complement your site's topic.

Building Your WordPress Website

This lesson is all about creating and organizing written content! It explores how to enter and organize the information your visitors are looking for, and how to create pages and posts. You'll also find out how to put together an effective menu to guide your guests around the site. Quality content and efficient navigation are the cornerstones of a successful website.

Exploring Plugins

In this lesson, you'll learn how to use plugins, which are features and tools that you can add to WordPress with a single mouse click. You'll learn where to find thousands of these free mini-programs and how to choose the best. What themes are to site design, plugins are to functionality.

Adding Images, Video, and Other Digital Media

This lesson covers how to add media to your pages. The WordPress Media Library helps you upload and edit your media files to create an engaging experience for visitors. You can also embed video, audio, PDF files, and maps from other sites into your site. The lesson will focus on media and all the ways it can enrich your website.

Customizing Themes

Themes are fine, but if you're interested in really fine-tuning your site's design, you'll want to go beyond accepting everything the theme designer came up with. This lesson will cover HTML and CSS coding, tools that you'll use to seriously refine your site's appearance. You'll learn the basics of each language and quickly discover how to change font styles, sizes, and colors, as well as create lists and work with margins. You'll also practice using some tools that can make working with CSS very easy. No coding required!

Mastering the Inspector

In this lesson, you'll work with a handy tool called the Inspector, which will help you make a few more design changes to your project website. You'll also look at two excellent plugins that can do some of the heavy lifting when you're modifying a website's layout and design.

Monetizing Your Website

So, how can you use your WordPress website to make money? That's what this lesson is all about. You'll learn ways to employ pay-per-click, advertising, and affiliate marketing programs. The lesson will also discuss PayPal and credit card processing and end by setting up a shopping cart system. While monetization may not be your primary goal, as long as you've put in the time and effort to create an online presence, there's no reason you shouldn't benefit from all that work if you wish. Even if your site isn't commercial, there may come a time when you want to solicit donations, include some ads, or sell promotional goods.

Maximizing Your Audience

What if you launch your site and nobody visits? And if you do get visitors, how can you know if you're giving them the information they came for? This lesson will answer those questions by showing you how to attract an online audience and also how to determine if you're satisfying their needs, so they revisit. We'll also examine some unique WordPress tools designed to help achieve these goals. Since 90% of a website's first visits result from online searches, it's important that you know what Google wants. Once you know this, you can use a set of strategies known as search engine optimization (SEO) to get your site in front of your audience.

Introduction to Block Editing

For many years, WordPress used a page (and post) editor named TinyMCE, which is the editor that you'll work with throughout this course. It resembles a word processor and includes a textbox, accompanied by a set of formatting icons, an Add Media button, and a code view where you can see and work with HTML and CSS code embedded within your text.

WordPress recently switched its default editor to a block editor. However, the classic editor will still be available for many years to come. In this lesson, you'll give the block editor a try to help you decide which editor you prefer.

Polishing Your Website for Launch

In the final lesson, you'll take a last look at ways to improve the practice site prior to launch. You'll examine a popular animated feature called a slider, add a widget to the sidebar, refine several elements of your site's visual design, and consider some different options for web hosting services.

In this Managing Web Design Projects training class, you will learn all about the design process and how to manage a web design project from start to finish.

This self-paced course will teach you how to manage web design projects. You'll learn how to optimize the web design process and take your projects from concept to iteration on time and within budget. With demand for skilled web designers and developers at an all-time high, adding project management to your UI/UX toolkit is key to meeting your clients' needs.

What you will learn

• Defining project scope
• Creating mockups and working with data
• Integrating the pieces of your website project
• Usability and accessibility considerations
• Steps in rolling out your project

How you will benefit

• Be able to analyze and learn from your project for future projects.
• Be able to fully manage web design projects
• Learn important skill for web designers

Requirements:

Hardware Requirements:

• This course can be taken on either a PC or Mac.

Software Requirements:

• PC: Windows 10 or later.
• Mac: macOS 11.0 or later.
• Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox are preferred. Microsoft Edge and Safari are also compatible.
• Adobe Photoshop.
• Adobe Dreamweaver.
• Any spreadsheet program, such as Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, or LibreOffice Calc.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader.
• Software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins.

Other:

• Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.

Instructional Material Requirements:

The instructional materials required for this course are included in enrollment and will be available online.

1. Design Process
2. Project Scope
3. Mock-ups
4. Functionality Model
5. Integration
6. Usability and Accessibility Rules
7. Roll-out
8. Analysis

What you will learn

• Define project scope.
• Creating mockups and working with data.
• Integrate the pieces of your website project.
• Usability and accessibility considerations.
• Rolling out your project.

How you will benefit

• Be able to analyze and learn from your project for future projects.
• Be able to fully manage web design projects
• Learn important skill for web designers