Welcome to The Classroom.
Instructor David Longey
Welcome to the class.
I'm an artist, animator, and amateur musician who has been building web sites since the very early days of the internet. Initially as a means of showing my work online, this evolved into a career as a designer and and instructor. The central online hub for my work is now in it's fourth iteration and can be viewed at www.handofdave.com
Web design is the newest and potentially the most powerful of publishing mediums. It is the vehicle within all forms of media can be carried: Text, audio, video, animation and interactive software applications.
Hypertext, the core feature that revolutionized previously static documents, allows us to instantly move thru documents, and within web sites, and beyond to retrieve the ever growing universe of human art and knowledge that exponentiially increases on a daily basis.
The world wide web democratizes the power of publishing. For very little money, an individual or group can make their work accessible to the whole planet. No longer are we limited by the physical limitations that have existed since Gutenberg's press made mechanical reproduction possible on a wider scale... even that revolution required great expense in equipment, material, and transportation costs for every publication, and still does to this day.
The web is also instantly editable and updatable. Instead of static printed pages, content can be modified as needed. Textbooks no longer need fall into obsolesence when they are online. News sources no longer need be limited to a daily edition that require bulky, wasteful amounts of environmentally harmful inks and thousands of acres of trees, or the fuel costs in transporting all of this material around.
No longer is music and art and video constrained by clumsy methods of distribution. Digitized media can be made available thru the internet without being locked into a schedule, as in live radio or television. Archived work gives us vast libraries at our fingertips, and without the need to travel and search through physical collections.
Search engines give us retrieval capabilities that previously were tedious and limited, under the old cataloging methodology.
Most interestingly, for the artist, the advent of this new publishing medium makes possible exciting new approaches that fuse and expand upon multiple forms of expression. In this course you will learn how to build your own web sites that meld athetic and practical disciplines to create a visually and contextually engaging experience.
Students of Holyoke Community College and Greenfield Community College can access their respective syllabus and scheduling information by clicking the appropriate course button. For other visitors to this site, the one hundred level course deals with basic web design that incorporate images, sound, and video. The two hundred level courses cover more advanced techiques with a focus on building Flash-based sites.
Questions can be emailed to me at Dave
HandofDave.com, or phoned in to 413-221-0130
Thank you for taking the course. Let's get started!
-David Longey