I have been asked to teach a web design course at NSCC (Amherst Campus). It’s a continuing education course, 1 night a week for 12 weeks. Originally it was supposed to start on January 14, however the dates for all the con. ed. courses have been moved up, so now it starts on February 4.

The original course description above includes Dreamweaver and Photoshop at the time of this writing, however once I looked it over and discussed it with the school, that will probably change. My concern was that by teaching specific software programs, students will be of the opinion that they must purchase these same programs in order to get value from the course - and last time I checked, Adobe CS4 Suite was around the $1800 mark. Well worth the money if that’s your profession, but in this case, there’s no way I can make people web design professionals in 36 hours. No, this course is intended to enable students to be able to make their own basic website, or properley maintain a company one, so I opted to not base the course on any software.

Most uninitiated people do not realize that you don’t actually need anything more than Notepad to make a full standards compliant website. The only issue is graphics, and other than basic photo manipulation I don’t think there will be time in this course for much graphics. The end result will hopefully be that students will be able to take a ‘Mike Holmes’ approach to building their own basic XHTML and CSS based website, keeping it standards compliant, without the need to purchase any software which is ultimately the best approach in my opinion.

It sounds like fun, I’m looking forward to it. There are probably still seat available, so if you’re interested contact NSCC.