Syllabus

Web Front-End Development

CIT 230

Purpose

When building web sites, successful web designers must consider all of the following: audience, organization, interface, usability, content, layout, and visual (aesthetic) design. This course will teach you to plan, design, and construct web sites to work properly in modern web browsers, conforming to web standards while following best practices.

Materials

To be successful in this course you'll need the following:

Compare prices for your textbooks through the University Store Price Comparison site. They will show you all of the options from the University Store plus several online options to help you find the best price.

Hosting

Students are responsible for acquiring a domain name and professional web hosting from a provider of their choice. Previous students have had success with these companies: JustHost.com, Hostmonster.com or Bluehost.com (each of these hosting companies provide a free domain name with purchased hosting). Hosting must be maintained for the duration of the course although most host providers will discount prices for longer periods.

Note

You will only need one domain name to host both of the websites you will build in this class. Short videos explaining the sign-up process for each of these hosting providers are available in a video helps list.

Course Objectives

These objectives are based on web standards and best practices to help you be successful in the future.

  1. Develop web pages that are semantically accurate using the HTML5 markup language.
  2. Style web pages using Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) level 3 and avoid all HTML presentational markup.
  3. Provide content that is visually appropriate, usable, and findable to humans and machines.
  4. Plan, design, and develop web pages and sites according to best practices of organization and maintainability.
  5. Solve problems through independent study and application-learn how to learn.
  6. Work effectively with others in a team environment by communicating clearly, fulfilling assignments, and meeting deadlines.

Becoming through Knowing and Doing

This course is the first step to become a web developer - which requires you to both know and do. In order to know something you must study, reflect and practice. To do requires effort and application to implement your knowledge. If you consistently do this you are on your way to becoming what you desire.

Contrary to many classrooms where you work alone, this class encourages you to work with others. You will form informal learning teams and these teams will be a primary source to turn to for help and feedback. However, ultimately YOU are responsible for your learning and for the results of your efforts.

Assessments

Each of the assessments listed below relate directly to one or more course objectives, indicated in brackets. Specific due dates are listed in the course schedule. Each assessment will be submitted as specified in the assessment description. Once posted, an assessment should remain unchanged until graded, with the grade appearing in the grade book. Each assessment will be graded using the provided grading matrix. It is YOUR responsibility to thoroughly read and understand the specification for each assessment and test your own product for compliance to the stated criteria. Peer review, feedback and correction using the grading matrix prior to the due date is encouraged.

Besides graded assessments there are a number of intermediate components leading to successfully completing the graded assessments listed in the lesson overviews as assessments. While not graded they are meant to keep you on-track and on time to completing the assessments that are graded.

Teaching Presentation [Objectives 1, 5 & 6]

Select a topic from the topics list and develop a 10-minute teaching presentation. The presentation must include:

  1. a working example of the topic being used,
  2. an explanation of how the topic is used in web design and/or development.

Your teaching presentation materials can be created in Power Point and posted to the Teach One Another DB in The Module 2 Intro area the Saturday before week that the Proof or concept is covered in the course. You must also post this same content on your course Website as an HTML5 web page after Lesson 4, Week 5, and a link to the teaching presentation materials must be placed in the footer of your course Website thereafter and be available on all pages, by the end of Building the Site Module 2 until the Last week of the class. The link must clearly identify that it leads to the teaching presentation materials. Carefully review the Teaching Presentation Grading Matrix. You must comment on at least one teaching presentation every week starting in Lesson 06 and continuing through Lesson 12.

Design Principles [3 & 6]

In order to plan your site design you will become familiar with four essential design principles: Proximity, Alignment, Repetition and Contrast as well as the principle of Typography. You will be responsible for identifying examples of each from the web and discussing how these concept will be implemented into your own design. Review the design principles grading matrix.

Planning the Individual Site [All Objectives]

Failure to plan is planning to fail is a truism and not more so than in developing a web site. Over and over site designers and developers have found that by careful planning, site design and construction is faster, cheaper, and produces a better outcome. Accordingly, you will carefully and methodically produce a site plan that describes the purpose, audience, persona(s), scenario(s), content list (content), and style guide (stylistic requirements) for your personal site. The plan itself consists of 3 parts: 1) Description, 2) Content list, and 3) Style guide. The completed site plan is due at the conclusion of the Planning unit. The Site Plan must be posted to your site as an HTML5 web page and a link to the site plan placed in the footer in each page of the web site. The link must clearly identify that it leads to the site plan. The site plan is required to meet the expectations found in the site plan grading matrix.

Constructing the Individual Site [1, 3, 4, 5 & 6]

After planning your web site, you will construct the site using best practices of information architecture, HTML5 and usability while populating the site with a variety of content and media types (text, images, video and audio) to deliver your message. The individual site is required to meet the expectations found in the site construction grading matrix.

Styling the Individual Site [2, 3 & 4]Finally, you will style the individual web site using CSS to meet the style requirements specified in the site plan. In addition to the stylistic application, the styling must meet best practice of maintainability, usability and responsiveness as outlined in the site styling grading matrix.

Final Web Site [Objectives-all]

The final web site will constitute the final exam for the course. It will require a second use of all concepts, principles, and techniques used in the personal web site, but applied to a site whose requirements are not decided by you. The final web site will be stressful in order test your capacity.

General Web Site Requirements

During the semester you will build two web sites-a personal site and a final exam site. Both web sites must meet these minimum expectations:

Note

This is a web course intended to help you learn how to construct web sites using HTML5 and CSS. Outside templates are not allowed, nor are pages built from site builder software. CSS frameworks are allowed, but you are responsible for editing bad, out-of-date or unnecessary code in the framework to insure that the code validates and the total weight of the web page is within the allowances of the course.

Personal Site Requirements

The personal site will:

  1. Meet the general web site requirements.
  2. Contain a minimum of 10 content pages, excluding the site plan, teaching presentation and design principle documents.
  3. Contain meaningful content appropriate to the stated purpose of the web site.
  4. Have a wide variety of media types to convey your message including text, images, audio, and video.
  5. Use a variety of web technologies including HTML5, CSS, PHP and JavaScript.
  6. Meet basic usability guidelines.
Final Site Requirements

The final site will:

  1. Meet the general web site requirements.
  2. Meet the requirements as outlined in the specifications when delivered at the beginning of the Assessment module.
Teaching Presentation Topics List

Please review the Teaching Presentation Topics List.

Where do I Get Help?

This course uses specialized practices and resources that may require additional support not normally offered to other courses. As always, you have your Online Instructor as your first line of support.

For individual help with your course work you may want to consider requesting a tutor at the Online Tutor Center.

For more general support you always have access to the Online Support Center and IT Help Desk, though they may not be able to help with the specific technical support often needed for this CIT course .

Getting Help

To many students learning HTML, CSS, and many of the tools and techniques of this course is equivalent to learning a foreign language. For 99% of students, it is not a matter of if, but rather when you will need help. There are a number of mechanisms built into the course so you can get help. They are:

Learning Teams-This is a small group of your peers, enrolled in the same class, doing the same preparations, activities and assessments. You should interact with this group frequently-ask questions, share insights, read one another's work, make comments and suggestions. Learn how to work together and support one another. This is a very powerful and useful model-one that is used in the web design and development industry.

Questions and Conversations Discussion Board- In this page your instructor will explain to you the activities for the week and give class wide instructions. This page is also a discussion board where you will be able to post questions, concerns, etc.

Teach One Another Discussion Board-This is a discussion board accomplishes many of the same things as the Notes from Instructor Discussion Board except this will be in small teams. The discussion board will also be monitored by the professor. All of your discussion board grades will be applied to Objective 5 and account for approximately 10% of the objective grade. Lack of participation in these Teach One Another activities puts you very close to failing objective 5 and lowering your grade one tier. Don't underestimate the importance of these activities to your learning as well as your final grade.

The Professor-You may ask the professor questions, interact with him/her, and get help just about any time.

Open Lab-For students who are on-campus, the lab is located in Smith 448. The schedule for the lab is posted outside the door.

Lab Assistants-The on-campus open lab has lab assistants who can be contacted via email and an online appointment set up to receive help. These lab assistants are available during their normal work hours in the lab. Your professor will have a list of these lab assistants and their email addresses usually by the second week of the semester.

Tutors-The on-campus tutoring center hires students to help other students. The tutors are available on a "by appointment" basis. This service is free unless you make an appointment and do not show up for the appointment-then your campus account is charged a fee.

Grading

Assignments are graded by the professor or teaching assistant (TA) and a score given for one or more course objectives. Passing course objectives, not the gross percentage shown in the grade book, determines the final course grade.

At the conclusion of the course, each course objective is graded Pass/Fail. To pass an objective, you must earn at least 80% of the points allocated to it. It is critical that you are always doing your best work, on time and error free-do not submit junk! You must follow the directions to have work graded.

This grading policy is subject to change at the sole discretion of the professor.

# of Objectives Passed

6

5

4

3

2

1

0

Grade Earned

A

B+

B

C+

C

D

F

Procrastination warning: If you wait to the last moment, you will fail! Don't do this!

We have created the Grades Spreadsheet that will minimize the work you must do to calculate your grade in CIT 230. In each of the assessment columns, you enter the number of points that you received for each assignment. The total at the far right of the spreadsheet (Columns BF through BM) of each objective is calculated as a percentage for you since it is above the 80% that you are shooting for. For each objective that you have a score lower than 80% your current grade will drop according to the specification in the table above i.e. A, B+, B, C+, C, D, or F, dropping one letter grade for each objective under 80%.

Note: The spreadsheet is set up in such a way that you cannot see your score perfectly. Your score will only be calculated if a score is entered for each assignment under each objective. This will function like a "what-if" calculator. You may enter scores to see what you will need on a given assignment to keep your grade in the green.

Tentative Schedule

The course is divided into four modules. Each module focuses on a particular topic, spans more than one week, has a number of preparatory and learning activities, and has a minimum of one summative assessment. Because this is a web development class, all assessments are submitted by being posted to your web site by Saturday at midnight unless otherwise specified. Once posted, an assessment should remain unchanged until graded and the grade posted. Five of the six summative assessments are described below. The sixth, the teaching presentation, will occur sometime in the first three modules depending upon when you sign up to post and present your teaching presentation.

Module 1-Planning, Design, and Preparation

This module, as the name implies, involves planning the personal web site. Topics include deciding a purpose for your site, identifying and describing the audience for your site, determining the content and audience desires from your site, gathering the content, and developing a style guide to follow when coding the visual appearance of the site. There will be six assessments for this module: 1) Proximity, 2) Alignment, 3) Repetition, 4) Contrast, 5) Typography design exercises and 6) the Site Plan.

Module 2-Building the Site

The building module focuses on building the site structure, templates and content structures while following established standards and best practices of syntax, semantics and usability for each of the involved technologies. The technologies to be used during this module include HTML5, PHP (for modularization purposes and developing a contact page) and JavaScript (for simple interactive tasks). One assessment will be produced during this module: the construction (not including styling) of the personal web site.

Module 3-Styling the Site

The styling module focuses on using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to style the personal web site following your style guide as written in the site plan. A key component of the style implementation process will involve making your site responsive-workable and fast-on three device types: desktop/laptops, tablets, and smartphones. The assessment will be the styling of the personal web site.

Module 4-Final Assessment

The last module includes the final web site, where you will construct a second web site, but to specifications provided to you by the professor. This module does not focus on learning new course-related content; rather, its focus is to assess your ability to produce a second site that demonstrates your mastery of a wide variety of knowledge, skills, concepts, and techniques related to Front-End Web development. The summative assessment of this module is the Final Exam web site.

Class Policies

Computer Ethics

The use of the BYU-I's network, systems, and data are to be used in an ethical manner and in accordance with the guidelines found in the Honor Code. Attempting to circumvent or subvert system security measures, or engaging in any activity that causes harm to systems or to any information stored thereon, such as creating or propagating viruses, disrupting services, or damaging files are considered inappropriate use. Violators are subject to disciplinary actions as prescribed by school policy and may also be prosecuted under applicable local, state, or federal civil or criminal law.

Content Disclaimer

This syllabus represents a proposed overview of the content, expectations, and sequence of the course. Changes may occur during the course at the discretion of the professor. Students will be informed when and if such changes occur.

Honor Code

All students are expected to abide by the Honor Code and Dress and Grooming Standards. These standards apply to all students, both in and out of class. If you are not sure of the standards or honor code.

Reasonable Accommodation for Students with Disabilities

In compliance with disability law, qualified students may be entitled to "reasonable accommodation." It is the student's responsibility to disclose to appropriate personnel in the Services for Students with a Disability Office any disability that requires accommodation. This should be done within the first week of classes.

Note

You should only email your instructor directly if the problem is of a personal nature OR your instructor informs you this is the way he/she would like to be informed of questions/problems/concerns.

Blainerobertson.net: Throughout this course we link to Bro. Robertson's website. This site provides many resources and explanations for the course. However it is primarily intended for his campus students. You should consult your online instructor to determine any differences in expectations.