There are a great number of things I've learned from the first part of Web Media. I'd taken the class before, so not everything was completely new information but I was pleasantly surprised how many things were.
1) I learned, first of all, the names of the men who invented the internet to begin with. Almost daily use without knowing the history behind it seems rather ignorant, so this was a good way to introduce the course and set the tone for a lot of learning in the coming weeks.
2) In this class my memory was refreshed with some HTML tags that I'd forgotten about such as heading tags, and tags to make text bold. Most main headings on website are images, but to know the heading tag is still handy in case there are parts of your website that are text only. I also re-learned meta tags, which help search engines find the site, and where to put them.
3) I learned about the Southern Cross cable which is one of the main internet sources for New Zealand, the South Pacific and a small part of the Australian east coast.
4) I learned more about div mapping and how this is an industry-standard method of creating the structure of a website. Unlike past methods of using tables, divs are good because they have no dimensions and are invisible unless otherwise configured in CSS. Adobe Dreamweaver has a handy visual aid in the design view that allows you to see a div container in the form of a dotted line. But I also learned that the design view in Dreamweaver can contain inaccuracies and that it's best to use the rainbow technique (making each div a different solid background colour in CSS to determine if they're working as they should be.
5) Today I remembered how handy the comment function in HTML could be. In div mapping, it became very handy for marking down easily the start and end of a div. In HTML, if there are a lot of divs used within one container it can be a bit confusing. On this note it's important when creating IDs for each div that they're typed in the same way to avoid confusion - I've learned that lower-case, no numbers and the 'camel technique' for more than one word is the best way to go.
6) I learned something completely new in Illustrator called the slicing tool. This essentially lets you click and drag any section of an image open in Illustrator and save that one part separately from the rest of the image. Even though that can be done by also cropping in Photoshop or another program, the slicing tool is specifically for this purpose and allows you to do it in less time. I'll almost certainly use this tool in the future.
7) Most of the other things I learned were some code tricks to make your website more interesting, mostly the correct code for adding forms and using a single image for all your menu's roll-overs (a technique whose existence I wasn't aware of). I've also become a bit more comfortable using margin tags. Float tags are still a foggy area for me so I may need some help with these in the future but all in all I've learned a lot of useful techniques which will undoubtedly help me in creating my main website.
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