Category Archive

I can hardly believe that the end of the semester is just a week away — time really has flown by! You’ve been a great class, and I hope you feel like you’ve grown as web designers and online content developers. With Exam #2 and the Best Practices Article behind us, we can focus all of our attention on the … Read More

I hope our peer critique exercise helped you identify some areas of improvement in your Best Practices Article. Next week, we’ll wrap up Unit #3 in order to focus solely on the Client Project until your final presentations. Both of our class sessions during Week 14 will be dedicated to that work. Here’s a summary of what we’ll be doing: … Read More

We have just a few weeks left in the semester and a lot we need to accomplish, so I’ve rearranged a few items on calendar and eliminated a few others. I think these changes will free up your time to develop your Best Practices Articles and give you more in-class time to work on the Client Project with your teammates. … Read More

With a finalized Unit #4 memorandum of understanding, your team should be making steady progress on your client site every week for the rest of the semester. I’ve scheduled several checkpoint assignments to help you stay on track, but you and your teammates will need to keep each other accountable, too. During Week 12, we’ll pass two of those checkpoints, … Read More

Now that we’ve discussed the assignment details for Unit #3, the Best Practices Article, and Unit #4, the Client Project, you should begin making progress on both assignments. For Unit #3, that means selecting a topic and finding out what others have already written about it. For Unit #4, it means completing your team’s Memorandum of Understanding and studying the … Read More

The drafts of your Responsive Microsites looked very impressive during our peer critique workshop today. I can’t wait to see your finished sites on Tuesday! As you revise your site, remember the feedback you received from your classmates — their reactions should be a good indicator of how your intended audience would perceive the site. If you have any questions as … Read More

At this point in the Unit #2 project, your responsive microsite should be almost complete, and you should be working to customize the text, images, and CSS so the site looks like your site, not just another “default” Bootstrap site. The long list of Bootstrap tools on the Resources page will help you create and modify the theme, pages, and … Read More

Next week is spring break, and I hope all of you enjoy some well-deserved rest. At the same time, I hope you won’t forget that you are only halfway through the Responsive Microsite project. At this point, you should be making steady progress on three interrelated tasks: Experimenting with the Bootstrap framework until you feel confident creating pages using containers, … Read More

Today’s Bootstrap workshop was intentionally slow and methodical, so I hope the concepts of “container,” “row,” and “column” have sunk deep into your brains. This weekend, you should continue to experiment with the Bootstrap framework, assembling various components in several different ways to get a sense of how they work together. I know this stuff is complicated, but there are … Read More

With our first project and our first exam behind us, we can give our full attention to Unit #2, the Responsive Microsite, which will keep us busy through the end of March. As we learn about responsive web design, our default tool will be Bootstrap, but you can apply the same underlying principles to any responsive framework or theme you … Read More

We have used Unit #1 as a platform for practicing the basic principles of HTML and CSS covered in our textbook. At this point, none of you knows everything there is to know about web design (spoiler alert: you probably never will), but you should feel confident in your ability to look at HTML, CSS, and image files and understand … Read More

It was great to see how quickly some of you worked your way through the tasks in CSS workshops this week. If you’re feeling confident during our in-class exercises, that’s a good sign. At this point, we’ve covered the basics of HTML and CSS markup, and your Unit #1 projects should be going from good to great as you apply … Read More

I told you that things would get a little more complicated during Week 2, and today’s exercises in class demonstrated that some of you aren’t keeping up with the material in our textbook. I know, I know, some of this stuff is dry and complicated, but it is absolutely essential that you have a firm grasp on the fundamentals of … Read More

Thanks for your participation and enthusiasm during our first two class sessions! I was impressed with your review of our first reading assignment, and I hope you’ll maintain that same level of attention as we make our way through the rest of the book. Here’s a quick overview of how we’ll spend our time during Week 2 and what you … Read More

Welcome to ENGL 4814: Developing Online Content. This website will function as the online headquarters for our class this semester. Each week, I will post an update to the website with details about coming week, deadline reminders, links to helpful resources, etc… I will use Virginia Tech’s Scholar site to record your grades, but otherwise, everything related to this course … Read More