Website user experience & CSS workshop

Taught at: Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane (Australia)
Workshop date:
This workshop is run with Russ Weakley from MaxDesign.

Workshop description

A hands-on workshop with user experience expert, Donna Maurer, and CSSexpert, Russ Weakley.Over two full days you will build detailed websites layouts from the ground up – starting with page layout, navigation and form design; and ending with clean markup and elegant styling using XHTML/CSS.

Day 1: Planning and designing the user experience – Donna Maurer

On day one you will plan and design a website – focusing on the user experience: designing the navigation, page layout and forms.You will:

  • learn techniques to understand your users, and prepare user scenarios
  • understand your content with content analysis methods
  • create an effective and usable site structure (information architecture)
  • design a range of navigation methods
  • create page layouts for content, home, index and special pages
  • design simple forms

For each step, Donna will outline the fundamentals and show examples from small and large website projects. But most of the time will be hands-on -you work on your own project, ask questions and discuss with the group.

Day 2: Building beautiful sites using CSS – Russ Weakley

On day two you will build your website from the ground up – starting with structural markup, adding accessible markup and then styling your layout using CSS.You will learn:

  • how to create well structured, accessible markup
  • the basics of CSS including rule sets, selectors, shorthand rules, inheritance and the cascade.
  • how to structure efficient CSS files
  • how to create a full CSS layout from a flat graphic mockup
  • how to deal with browser issues including specific browsers such as IE5,IE6 and IE7.
  • how to create a resolution dependent layout
  • how to create CSS for printing and hand held devices

Testimonials

Feedback from participants from these workshops included:

  • “Great examples of how I can apply techniques”
  • “The comprehensive workbook with further references/books, examples and pictures was great”
  • “It was thorough, delivered with regular visual examples, solid knowledge, humour, functional activities”