Build your own Website: Time-table

This course will teach you how to create a website and make it available to the world. It will not teach you how to use Dreamweaver or FrontPage, or a CMS (Content Management System) such as WordPress or Drupal. It will teach you how to set up web pages yourself and link them together as you wish. This means you understand what's going on and can fix problems. There are lots of very pretty websites out there which have been professionally and expensively designed, but the owners have no idea how to update them — or every time they try, something goes wrong. I won't leave you in the lurch like that!

Many websites contain just static text — every time someone clicks on the page they see the same thing unless the owner has manually updated it. More complicated websites are dynamic — the user inputs some information and the results of a calculation or search are displayed. For static websites I use HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) — the standard language of websites since the web started, and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) — so that you can change the style of all your web pages in one place rather than having to search through all the pages for purple titles because you've decided you prefer blue ones. I also use JavaScript, a programming language which run's in the user's browser rather than on your server — I'll mention that later.

For dynamic web sites, in addition to all this I use Microsoft's ASP (Active Server Pages) or ASP.NET, or PHP (which runs on both Microsoft and non-Microsoft servers), and if I need a database I use Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL Server for the Microsoft servers and MySQL for the non-Microsoft servers, though there's no problem using other standard databases. I won't be covering any of this on the course — let me know if you want a separate course!

I've run this course three times. I don't know when and where I will next get to teach it — I'm open to offers!