Since the creation of the Internet and the world wide web in the mid nineties, we have been rapidly reorganizing our lives and society around them. What remains constant is that the web is a human phenomenon. There are many technologies involved in the web, to be sure; but it is the people that these technologies bring together that are important. In this class, we will study the principles of human communication online: information architecture, usability, and accessibility. In the process, you will learn HTML, along with its sister language CSS (used for controlling the visual appearance of HTML documents). You will also learn the basics of creating web graphics.
With these basic skills in hand, you will be prepared to create and maintain basic web sites. We will not cover JavaScript or server-side programming languages like PHP or Perl, and we will not study databases or SQL. However, by the end of the class you should be well-prepared to learn these things either through experimentation or in another class.