Answers to 'Taking Stock'

This semester I’m taking Principles of Publication Design. Currently we are reading the book Learning Web Design by Jennifer Niederst Robbins. In one of her exercises she asks the reader to reflect on a few items. The following are my responses.

What are your web design goals? My overall goal in any class I take is always the same—to become better at what I am doing so that I can teach my students better. Since I already teach a basic level web design class, my web design goals are to make my students future web designers.

Which aspects of web design interest you the most? It is hard for me to narrow down to just one aspect; the one I know the most about is the ‘structure layer’. I would like to learn about the ‘behavior layer’ since this is something I know little about and I would like to be able to do the whole process someday.

What current skills do you have that will be useful in creating web pages? Beside that fact I already know some basic html and understand the rules of xml, I also have a few personal skills that give me an advantage. I teasingly say that I am OCD. It comes in handy when students can’t get a page to work properly, I can look at their lines of code and spot the problem pretty quickly. Most students can’t understand how I see the little missing “ or / or <

Which skills will you need to brush up on? My knowledge of currently used tags is out of date. I don’t enjoy researching new tags like my students. I know I need to see what is currently being used and update my code knowledge. I also need to become better at using a database. I only have to teach such a basic level of database that I fear I will never get enough interest going to learn what I would need to become ‘professional’ at that part of web design.

Which hardware and software tools do you already have for web design? At my school I have access to PhotoShop and Notepad. I’m learning along side my students to use PhotoShop and I am grateful that I did not have to pay for the program. I find that I use it for other projects too.

What tools do you need to buy? I would like my school to buy some kind of web page authoring tool. We currently only use Notepad to write up our code for our pages. Though, it does force me to know how to code better.