Info & Syllabus
Techniques for Web Interfaces is a Fall 2009 student-taught course at Carnegie Mellon by Tony Poor. A full syllabus is also available as a PDF, if you prefer.
Course Description
This course is designed for beginners to the world of web design. The focus for the first half of the course is on front-end engineering and CSS. This serves as a foundation for the guiding principles of accessibility, standards, usability, and good design, which we’ll cover more thoroughly in the second half of the course. A bit of basic HTML knowledge is highly recommended.
There is no mandatory attendance and every class will be accompanied by slides and/or a handout, but keep in mind that we’ll primarily be learning by example (which the handouts aren’t exactly loaded with). If you miss class, then you’ve really only got the slides/handouts to fall back on… which probably won’t be enough to learn from.
Instructor Contact
Office hours are generally held from 5:00 to 5:30pm in the Gates Center's sixth-floor lounge. Otherwise, feel free to contact me via:
- Email: tpoor@cmu.edu
- AIM: tonypoor
Assignments & Grades
Your final grade (pass/fail) is determined by your final project (65%), midterm exam (20%), and quizzes (15%). A passing grade is 60 or more.
Final Project (65%): Your final project will be to design some web site of your choosing. This is intentionally open-ended and will proceed in a few discrete steps (which will be discussed later on). Note that you can pass the entire class simply by having an awesome final project.
Midterm Exam (20%): The midterm will take place on October 13 and will cover all material from the first half of the course.
Quizzes (15%): There will be occasional (very small) in-class quizzes; these will be announced beforehand and will cover the material from the preceding lecture. After the quiz, I’ll provide the answers on the class website and will go over them in class, but (for the sake of my sanity) no make-ups allowed.