Building an Effective Website

Prerequisites:

- Delegates should have some technical experience, a working knowledge of the Windows operating environment and be familiar with the concepts and use of the Internet.
- Some HTML knowledge would be helpful although not essential.
- Delegates without any previous experience should consider attending either our Web Publishing using Microsoft FrontPage or Web Publishing using Dreamweaver course prior to this course.

Course Description:

There has been enormous growth in the use of the World Wide Web for delivering information and extending commercial capabilities. An organisation's web site is now increasingly becoming its public face. This places a heavy responsibility on the interface design to ensure that it properly reflects the organisation, and worthy of a visit. There are many balances to be struck between exploitation of the available technology and the usability and accessibility of the information provided.

The design issues affect Internet and intranet publishers alike and the questions are many: When is it best to use images? What sort of technology is available for interactive content? How is information passed back to the server? How accessible is my content? These are all questions that need to be addressed when trying to provide information across the network in the best way.

This course shows technologies and tools available for building a web site and will help you to decide which of them are best suited to your environment. Delegates will gain experience of building professional web content using the latest technologies to augment the user experience.

In addition to the lectures, this course is designed to provide delegates with hands-on experience of building their own Web site. During the practical sessions you can choose which tool you would prefer to use - instructions are provided for Microsoft FrontPage and Dreamweaver, as well as a pure HTML editor.

The course is aimed at anyone who has been charged with setting up a website or developing web content as well as those interested in getting a better understanding of the many technologies used to deliver web content.

Course Objectives

At the end of this course, you will be able to:

- Create dynamic Web sites
- Include graphics and multimedia
- Design sites that are easily navigated and professional
- Use advanced HTML, such as tables, frames and cascading style sheets
- Read and write complex HTML
- Understand the management issues involved in Web site design and maintenance
- Understand principles of client-side and server-side technologies for creating interactive content, including CGI, ASP, Java, JavaScript, VBScript and Dynamic HTML
- Configure websites for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Interact with databases
- Use HTML4 tags and attributes
- Work with dynamic HTML and CSS positioning
- Understand XML concepts
- Understand public and private key encryption, digital signatures and digital certificates
- Understand mobile phone technologies
- Understand RSS Newsfeeds
- Describe e-commerce categories

This course includes the following modules:

Introduction

• Web evolution
• The Internet and intranets
• Benefits to an organisation
• WWW Browsers
• Web server software

World Wide Web Basics

• URLs and navigation
• Ports in action
• The HyperText Transfer Protocol
• Browser operation
• HTTP interactions
• Client Request and Server Response
• MIME

Basic HTML

• HTML standards
• Tags, attributes and values
• Character formatting
• Character entities
• Text formatting
• Ordered and unordered lists
• Hyperlinks and anchors
• Relative and absolute URLs

Web Tools

• ASCII editors and WYSIWYG tools
• Netscape Composer
• Microsoft FrontPage
• Office Web components
• Microsoft Visual Studio
• Macromedia Dreamweaver
• HTML validators and consistency checkers

Images

• File formats
• GIF, JPEG, PNG
• Transparent GIFs
• Inline Images
• Image configuration
• Background colour and images
• Graphical hyperlinks
• Image maps (Server side and client side)

More HTML

• Basic tables
• Tables layout
• Complex tables
• Sizing tables
• Framesets
• Frameset document structure
• Hyperlinks within frames
• Special hyperlink targets
• Inline frames
• Cascading Style Sheets
• Embedded, inline and linked stylesheets
• Classes and ID?á¨∞?á¨∂s
• Spans and divisions

Other Media Formats

• Sound Formats
• Adding sounds to web pages
• Background sound
• Animated GIFs
• Video Formats
• Video links and inline video
• Streaming Video
• Shockwave and Flash
• Adobe PDF

Web Site Design

• Making the site easy to navigate
• Bandwidth considerations for multimedia
• Image compression
• Sound and video compression
• Supporting different browsers
• Style guides

Architecture

• Multiple developer sites
• Testing and deployment
• Version control
• Shared files
• Server side includes
• Site management
• Auto Redirection
• Virtual servers and directories
• Server Hosting

Other Internet Services

• Browser functions and gateways
• FTP URL syntax
• Anonymous FTP
• FTP versus HTTP for downloads
• Mailto and Usenet schemes
• Discussion Webs
• Telnet
• Peer to Peer

Dynamic Content (Server)

• Static and dynamic data
• Common Gateway Interface(CGI)
• Scripting languages
• Invoking a CGI script
• GET and POST methods
• URL encoding
• Server Technologies
• ASP, JSP, PHP, ASP.NET
• CGI and security issues
• Building HTML forms
• The input types
• Submitting forms

Dynamic Content (Client)

• Client side scripting mechanism
• Scripting languages
• The SCRIPT tag
• Scripting basics
• JavaScript samples
• Events and form validation
• Browser variations
• JavaScript standards
• ECMAScript

Java Overview

• Java overview
• Portability
• Java architecture
• Java security
• Java Applets
• The Java Virtual Machine (JVM)
• Servlets and JSPs
• Applets sources

Active Server Pages (ASP)

• ASP introduction
• The ASP page
• ASP processing
• The ASP object model
• Applications and sessions
• Requests and responses
• Web applications
• Asp Debugging

Search Engine Optimisation

• Indexing and search facilities
• Types of search engine
• Automated search engines
• Directory based search
• Document design for searching
• Using the META tag
• Robots and security

Database Integration

• Database products
• Web database access
• Three tier applications
• ODBC, OLEDB and JDBC
• Middleware integration products
• Microsoft ADO and ADO.NET
• Transacted database access

Dynamic HTML

• The Document Object Model (DOM)
• Elements and events
• Browser support
• Static, absolute and relative positioning
• Positioning
• Dynamic content and styles
• Microsoft filters

HTML4

• W3C specification
• HTML4 v HTML3.2
• Changes and additions to tags and attributes
• Changes and additions to form and table tags and attributes
• Accessibility
• Internationalisation
• Deprecated tags
• Browser support

eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML)

• eXtensible Mark up Language
• What is XML
• Representing Data
• HTML vs XML
• Well formed XML
• XML document structure
• Document Type Definition(DTD) and Schemas (XSD)
• Valid XML documents
• Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT)
• Data exchange and interoperability
• XHTML

Security

• HTTP Authentication
• Security issues
• Protection through encryption
• Public and private key encryption
• Message authentication (Message digests)
• Digital signatures
• Digital certificates
• Certification authorities
• The secure socket layer (SSL)

Content Delivery

• Wireless Internet access
• The wireless access protocol (WAP)
• Wireless mark-up language (WML)
• Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
• RSS Newsfeeds
• RSS clients

E-Commerce

• Business drivers and marketplace
• Categories
• Business-to-customer (B2C)
• Business-to-business (B2B)
• Systems integration
• Enabling technologies
• Building E-Commerce solutions
• Application Service Providers
• Payment solutions