This past spring, I took two classes–HTML and Dreamweaver. Both were online classes–I had never taken an online class before and was pleasantly surprised at how much I learned without physically being in the classroom.

As a marketing professional, I used the Web quite extensively to market products as it is a powerful and cost-efficient way to reach a broad audience. I wanted to take my experience one step further and learn how a Web page is created. Just like knitting where the instructions look like another language, HTML is a computer language with its own set of instructions. In the 6-week class, I learned the fundamentals of Web design, planned the content, structure of my Web site and created pages with backgrounds, tables, hot buttons and animations. I even got more insight into search engine listings.

The other class I took was Dreamweaver which is an industry-standard Web design program. This class required purchasing Dreamweaver software. The challenge that I had was that I purchased the latest version of Dreamweaver (I mean, why would I buy an older version), but the course material was written for Dreamweaver 8. I’d say about 80% was still valid, but there were a lot of parts that I skipped because it was not relevant with the newer version.

Anyway, in this class, I learned how to create documents and work with text, images, links, tables and multimedia files. I learned that there are 5 primary questions to guarantee success for any Web site project:

1) What is the primary objective of my site?

2) Who is the intended audience?

3) How will visitors be viewing the site?

4) How should visitors navigate my site?

5) What will the site look like?

I highly recommend these classes for anyone interested in creating their own Web site!