A new session of each course opens each month, allowing you to enroll whenever your busy schedule permits!
How does it work? Once a session starts, two lessons will be released each week, for the six-week duration of your course. You will have access to all previously released lessons until the course ends.
Keep in mind that the interactive discussion area for each lesson automatically closes 2 weeks after each lesson is released, so you’re encouraged to complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.
The Final Exam will be released on the same day as the last lesson. Once the Final Exam has been released, you will have 2 weeks plus 10 days to complete the Final and finish any remaining lessons in your course. No further extensions can be provided beyond these 10 days.
Week One
Lesson 01 - Getting Started
Wednesday
This first lesson focuses on whom this class is for and what it's all about. You will get hands-on right away, creating a folder and adjusting some settings in your operating system and editor so you're ready to start creating a website. Finally, you will learn to save time by creating an HTML5 page template that you can use as the starting point for each new page you create in this course and later on your own.
Lesson 02 - Styling Your Website
Friday
In this lesson, you will discover how CSS lets you give your site a consistent look, feel, and unique identity. If you ever decide to change something in your styling, you won't have to go digging through all the pages individually to make changes. You just change your style sheet in one place, and all the pages in the site update instantly and automatically.
Week Two
Lesson 03 - Styling Backgrounds
Wednesday
Background colors, photos, textures, patterns, and gradients can really add some pizzazz to your website. In this lesson, you will learn to do them all, and you will have a lot of fun doing so.
Lesson 04 - Borders, Corners, and Shadows
Friday
In this lesson, you will learn how to add some real professional polish to your design with borders, rounded corners, and drop shadows. Better yet, they're easy to do, thanks to some simple CSS properties.
Week Three
Lesson 05 - Styling Text
Wednesday
This lesson will teach you about the many ways you can style your text with CSS, including fonts, text shadows, and more. This lesson starts with an overview of the primary tags for text markup in HTML. Then you will explore the many properties CSS offers for making your text look great.
Lesson 06 - Spice It Up With Pictures
Friday
Pictures add a lot of visual interest to any website, and in this lesson, you will learn all about using pictures in your site. First, you will start with an overview of the types of pictures you can use, and then learn how to insert them using HTML tags. Finally, learn the ways you can float, position, and size pictures using CSS.
Week Four
Lesson 07 - Mastering Style Classes and Link Styles
Wednesday
In this lesson, you will learn about style classes and links. Style classes are a great tool for defining styles that you can use freely wherever you want throughout your site. They can be a real boon to your creativity and a real time-saver for managing your styles. You will also learn about pseudo-classes, which are a special type of class for styling links and mouse-over effects. As an added bonus, you will learn some advanced techniques for links including opening pages in a new window, using jump links within a page, adding tooltips to your links, using pictures as links, and creating email links.
Lesson 08 - Fun With Sound and Video
Friday
Nothing brings a site to life better than sound and video. In this lesson, you will learn all the newest and most modern techniques for playing sounds and showing videos on your site. You will learn the secrets of embedding YouTube videos on your pages, so you don't have to upload video files to your own site. You will also learn about all the modern file formats and HTML5 tags for embedding sound and music into your pages without using YouTube or any other site.
Week Five
Lesson 09 - Styling Tables
Wednesday
HTML tables are the perfect tool for displaying information in rows and columns, like tables you see in print. In this lesson, you will learn techniques for styling tables with traditional CSS, as well as brand new CSS3 techniques that really make tables shine with minimal coding.
Lesson 10 - Mastering the CSS Box Model
Friday
This lesson is all about solving the mysteries and overcoming the frustrations by exposing the secrets of the ever-important CSS Box Model. Getting control of the size and location of things and the gaps between them can be a real challenge for web designers.
Week Six
Lesson 11 - Creating Modern Page Layouts
Wednesday
Modern business websites often use page layouts that include a header, footer, sidebar columns, and a navigation bar. Historically, these layouts were done using HTML tables or div tags. In this lesson, you will learn what those tags are, how to make them work in new and older browsers alike, and some professional-grade techniques for styling them with CSS.
Lesson 12 - Making a Multi-Column Layout
Friday
Your final lesson is all about adding side columns to your layout, be it a left column, a right column, or both left and right columns. As an added bonus, you will add a vertical navigation bar to a side column with the links large enough that they're easy to work with a mouse, as well as a fingertip or stylus on a mobile touch screen.