We’ll review the course web site, including the syllabus and the course outline. We’ll also do introductions, and talk about what makes a web site “good.”

We’ll spend some time discussing weblogs. What are they? How are they different from “regular” web sites? What opportunities and challenges do they present for web developers? Weblogs are a specialized type of CMS, or content management system, so we’ll talk about CMS more generally, as well.

Weblogs will be an integral part of the course this quarter. This site, for example is a special-purpose weblog. Each of you will be creating your own weblogs for posting in-class exercises and links to assignments, as well as your thoughts on lectures and readings.

Because the Movable Type weblog software we’ll be using is a set of programs that run on the web server, we’ll review some basic server concepts so that you can install the programs in your Grace account.

At the end of class, I’ll do a brief review of basic CSS formatting concepts for students who did not have CSS in 320 or 741 class.