Introduction
Everybody has things they love and hate about the web. And then there are those of us who actually put things out here for everyone to critique. This site was originally created for a workshop I taught at a conference a few years back. Since then I've changed jobs, and now I'm teaching some web design classes at Richmond. The stuff you'll find here now supports those classes for the most part, though I think I'll be adding more and more as the weeks go by.
About Me
In 1991 I started a discussion group devoted to the life, literature and times of the poet John Milton. When I became aware of the web in 1995 it seemed only natural that I assemble a web site in support of the discussion group. Today the site is usually among the top 5 sites visited here at Richmond, with over 6000 visits each month.
Now I maintain a bunch of different sites, which I break into three categories: official (corporate or departmental), topical (a site devoted to a theme) and personal. You can surf these sites (which are always undergoing change) by surfing the links on the top right of these pages.
I also work with Flash, RealAudio and RealVideo, Quicktime, as well as database-to-web applications like ColdFusion and Oracle Application Server. Before long you'll be seeing more about each of these technologies here too. Fun fun fun.
What's Here
What you'll find here is information on how to jazz up a web site without much technical experience and without much money. You can bring audio to your site without spending a dime; you can make your pages dynamic without learning how to create JavaScript or Java.To accomplish the exercises here you will need to know a little bit, though. You need to know that web pages have two main parts, a <HEAD> area that contains mostly instructions that are not visible on the web page, and a <BODY> area that contains most of what you see on a web page. You'll also need to know just a teeny bit of HTML, specifically that the code for a web link looks like this:
<A HREF="http://www.richmond.edu/">University of Richmond</A>
and that the code for an image on a page looks like this:
<IMG SRC="../images/op.gif" ALT="Multimedia and the Web">
If you know these four things, as well as how to copy and paste from one document to another, you'll be able to do all of the exercises here.
On the home page I've got a link to my email address. Send me email if you have questions. I've also made a link to this site on the web, which I plan to update as technology progresses. Please feel free to stop back from time to time if you find the information here useful.
Finally, a caveat: what you'll find here are the results of my experiences on the web. It's quite possible there's a better way to do something, and if you know that way I hope you'll let me know. The web is a collaborative effort, and all of us could use some help.
