DISTANCE EDUCATION - ONLINE COMMUNICATIONS COURSE
Learn a unique blend of marketable skills in publishing, photography and IT.
Develop skills in freelance writing, programming a web site and a broad understanding of the modern publishing industry. The publishing industry has changed greatly over recent decades, embracing IT not only for writing, but also production and increasingly for publishing. This is a very good course for anyone seeking a start in today's publishing industry.
This course is a must for writers, journalists, freelance writers, and anyone interested in writing for the web.
Modules
Note that each module in the Certificate In Electronic Journalism is a short course in its own right, and may be studied separately.
OUTLINES OF SELECTED MODULES
Writing a Web Site (HTML)
This covers the following areas of study:
Introduction to the Internet and HTML
The most important HTML Tags
Simplification through HTML Construction Software
Creating Links
Loading a Site onto the Internet
Adding Graphics
Designing a Web Site that Works
Advanced Features
Digital Photography
This covers the following areas of study:
Introduction To Digital Technology How images are captured and stored, categories of equipment & software, scope of applications
Equipment
Digital Technology - Colour, resolution, sensors
Digital Cameras
Taking Photographs
Scanners
Uploading Images
The Digital Darkroom
Compositing & Imaging - Production & manipulation of images
Special Effects
Outputs & Applications- Printers, The Internet
Freelance Journalism
This covers the following areas of study:
Introduction
Basic Writing Skills
The Publishing World
Manuscripts
Planning
Newspaper Writing
Magazine Writing
Writing books
Writing advertising
Special project
Advanced Writing Skills
This covers the following areas of study:
Writing Themes
Writing a Regular Column
Educational Writing
Scientific Writing
Writing a Biographical Story
Writing a News Article
Fiction Writing
Other Writing.
Introduction to Publishing
This covers the following areas of study:
Nature and Scope of the Publishing world
Desktop Publishing A
Desktop Publishing B
Illustration: Graphics
Illustration: Photography
Research Skills : Market Research, researching an article, etc
Marketing of Publications
Ethics & the law in publishing
Developing a publishing project
ASP.net
This module will expand on website database development techniques and more using Microsofts ASP.NET technology.
There are 11 lessons as follows:
Introduction
VB.NET Essentials
Web Forms
Web Server Controls
Form Validation
Classes and Namespaces
Creating ASP.NET Applications
ADO.NET
Error Handling
Email from your Applications
Project: Creating an Online Store
Extract from the HTML Module
STYLE SHEETS
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets (commonly referred to as CSS) are used to achieve a consistent look and feel for all the web pages of a website. CSS contain the styles and colours required for every element on a webpage, and allow you to change a style or colour of many web pages in a very simple way.
While building and designing a website, there are 3 different ways to include CSS with your HTML code. You can either have inline CSS, internal or embedded CSS, or external CSS. These will be explained in more details in lesson 5, however it is important to note that external CSS is the most popular form, because it allows you to store your CSS code in a separate file, and keep your HTML code neat and tidy by removing any design-related code and storing it in the CSS file.
External Style Sheet
As your HTML pages and websites become increasingly complex, maintaining font styles, colours and layouts will become more and more difficult. For example, if you decide to change the size or colour of all the headings in your site, you will need to read each line of your web pages looking for the occurrence of that heading style so it may be changed.
As mentioned in the previous section, it is best to store any design code in an external CSS file, which will contain the definitions of the font and layout styles to be used across many web pages. This promotes easy management and ensures consistency across your entire site.
When using an external style sheet, you need to explicitly include a link tag in each of your HTML pages, and make sure you save your CSS file with a “.css” extension. This will enable your HTML page to load that style sheet and apply the various colours, styles and design to the web page. Note that you can create many style sheets and reference them in the same HTML page. This is simply done by including a separate link tag for each CSS file.
To reference a single external style sheet, you need to include a link tag to the CSS file in the head section of the HTML page as shown below:
<link href=”myStyles.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”/>
The above tag means that we are including the stylesheet named “myStyles.css” in our HTML page.
An example of a simple CSS file follows:
body
{
color: #000000;
}
table
{
background-color: #DD33FF;
}
The above code will set the text colour inside the body tag to #000000, and the background-colour inside any table to #DD33FF.
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