Internet Investigations

Software: Wordpress, Brackets, Filezilla

Topics

In this unit and throughout this course students will be using WordPress, a popular content management system (CMS), to create a research blog for the course. With the rise of social media, blogs are less of a central presence online, but they are an effective platform for thoughtful research and still a main focus of Wordpress.

Students will research and post discoveries about a range of topics related to art, design, and technology. In addition to learning about web design, students should effectively communicate their research to classmates through thoughtful writing.

This unit will introduce some of the core concepts of user experience design, as well as the essential technologies that the Internet runs on—including a crash course in HTML and CSS. The focus of this course is not on extensive coding, but as we experiment with different web platforms, it will be helpful to understand the technical structure of web design.

Beyond this course, the media authoring skills acquired can be applied/transferred to any range of creative, personal, professional, promotional, or academic research purposes.

Format

• Lesson 1
  • Exercise 1: Self-portrait site
  • Exercise 2: Wordpress
  • Assignment: First blog post
• Lesson 2
  • Exercise 1: Personal Typography
  • Exercise 2: Custom Fonts
  • Assignment: Landing Page
  • Blog post