A few months ago, i tried to find a modern web design course (semantic HTML and CSS), but unfortunately i found none. Even the leading training center, New Horizons, did not seem to offer anything related (their HTML documents’ source code use two ‘html’, ‘head’ and ‘body’ tags. So you can figure that out without asking them).

So by the end of the year 2005, i planned to offer such course myself. I wrote an outline of the course, the ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ in a proposal , and started thinking of someone who’s willing to give me a chance. The first place i thought of was my previous high-school. I went there and talked to the head manager, who ,thankfully, helped me to start the course much earlier than i thought.

I started teaching the course last tuesday with 10 interested students. Even though i taught only 3 hours so far, but that gave me a clear idea how difficult teaching is. You should be really patient and work hard to make things as easy (and as clear) as possible. You don’t really appreciate your teachers until you get to teach. The worst part is that i’m doing it for free since it’s my first time. Plus i have to make sure that the order and nature of topics introduced in this course suits beginners.

Here’s a quick summary of the course’s topics in order (not final yet) :

• Introduction.
• Firefox and it’s helpful extensions.
• HTML basics.
• CSS Basics.
• CSS box model.
• Cross-browser compatibility.
• Laying out pages using CSS.
• Cross-resolution compatibility.
• Semantic logic. (which focuses on how to completley seperate the structure from the layout)
• CSS anthology (selected topics).
• Web Design Anthology. (how modern websites are supposed to be)
• Code Validation.
• Testing and Optimazing layouts.
• Appendix : Server Side Includes.

The order of topics will most likely change the next time i teach the course (if i teach it that is).

The best part is that the school’s authorized training center will give approved certificates to those who pass the course. So this is going to be the first modern web design certificate in my country (as far as i know). I hope the rest of the course goes well.

Finally ! After days of hard work, i finished re-making my Web Site from a scratch. Now i’m using Wordpress to manage the whole site. It’s really good (compared to my old personal control panel at least) and setting it up was incredibley easy. The hardest part was using my own layout with Wordpress, but it’s still not that difficult. Special thanks goes to my friend John Stone for helping me out in configuring Wordpress (he has nothing better to do, but that doesn’t really matter here ).

The site is pretty empty right now. I’ll start adding to it gradually whenever possible. I thought i should put it online since the blog section (aka: the main page) is finished (or almost). Expect to see a few errors and weird stuff here and there for a few days as i’m still working on it.

Cheers !