Paul Scollon of altFIRE Technologies will be teaching a night class via the Lifelong Learning Centre at DkIT on Advanced Web Page Design, particularly the use of PHP, MySQL and CMS systems like Joomla!
The course covers the following:
- Setting Up Web Servers – installing PHP, MySQL and other tools required to host your own website.
- Using Content Management – creating data structures, deciding on sections and categories, adding articles and more.
- Navigation – find out how to build your pages and then create menu items as you go to develop the best layout.
- Add Some Spice – using built–in modules to make your site more interactive.
- User Participation – include search capability, polls, menus and banners.
- Simplifying the work – use templates to determine what goes where, how modules are positioned, and where to display page content.
- Real world modelling – add everything from complete shopping–cart systems to photo galleries and multilingual content managers.
- Getting Online – how to import/export databases, upload your files and attach a domain name, email address etc.
- Getting Noticed – search engine optimization, Google Ranking and Facebook/Twitter integration.
Students will have a fully functional website ready to go online by the end of the course. Ideally students will possess their own laptop for the duration of the course so they can take their work home and complete after classes.
Paul was also guest speaker at the recent successful IT training seminar on Open Source, an alternative to the familiar types of software we all know (we hope to run another seminar in the new year if you missed this one). The workshop introduced powerful open-source alternatives to major commercial software that can help keep your small business afloat on a shoestring budget. The technology taught in the class is one of the ones mentioned on the day.
See here for more information and how to apply. Paul and his colleague Andrew Clarke won a golden Spider Award on behalf of Dundalk Institute of Technology in 2007.
