Web Publishing and Publicizing Course

Welcome to web publishing and publicizing by the Virtual Training Company. My name is Mark Virtue. I am a software engineer, web developer and trainer and I will be your guide and instructor through the remainder of this course. We will begin, naturally enough, here at the introduction where I will discuss with you what this course is about, whom this course is for and the way that this course is going to be presented to you. Let’s begin. The first thing we'd all better know about is the aim of this course; what this course is trying to teach you, the aim is as follows. To give you a thorough understanding of the concepts, tools and processes involved in creating, publishing and publicizing a website. I hope that the aim of this course coincides with your objectives in purchasing this course. It's easy enough to state the aim of this course but what does it really mean, what does that paragraph in front of you actually reflect. Well I will answer that in a few ways, one of the things is I will tell you what it doesn't mean. I have been in the software training game for a few years now and in the web publishing game for about as long, and I have noticed a distinct lack in the way that most web publishing training courses are taught to people and I am not just talking about training courses where you go and sit in a classroom, I am also talking about the books and any other sorts of online training that you might find. To understand this lack, imagine that you are someone who is wishing to publish a website, now that's probably not too much of the stretch of the imagination, I’m guessing that if you have this course in front of you that you are looking to publish a website. What you might have done is gone out and purchased a book, one of those great big 80 dollar Bibles on say Macromedia Dreamweaver, or html in 21 days or how to get started with Microsoft FrontPage or something like that. Now it's my belief that if you purchase one of these books, you’re only half way there. Those books and those training courses correspond with them are fine as they stand but they don't give you the whole picture. It's a bit like buying a hammer and you maybe you would buy a book on how to use a hammer, you could be a compete expert then on how to use a hammer, but still have no idea how to build a table. Knowing how to hammer in a nail does not necessarily guarantee that you’re going to know the best place to hammer in a nail. I use the hammer analogy because Macromedia Dreamweaver, Microsoft FrontPage and the rest of them, they are all just tools and it’s all very well to master the tool but you have to really know what to do with the tool and that's where this training course comes in. You could make yourself an expert in html but still not have the first idea as to how to say register a domain name or get yourself listed in a search engine. or understand what a cgi bin is or know when to use jpegs and when to use gifs for your images or know how to get a website published using ftp or how to add a hit counter to your website, this to me is the lack in these training courses. They will just teach you one very small and very specific task like html or FrontPage, they don't give you the big picture. That's what this course is for, to give you the big picture. Who is this course aimed at? It’s aimed at anyone who wants to publish a website and I’m not just typing about a simple one page website like 'Hello my name is Mark and here is a photo of my dog'. I’m talking about a website that has several pages with images, with perhaps scripting and forms, perhaps using some form of Java or perhaps even Javascript, published to a web host and is using a domain name. Getting all of that achieved is no small task. So you’ve taken the right steps, you’ve purchased yourself a training course to show you how to do it. This training course is going to save you the time of making all those mistakes. So what are the pre requisites for this course? Well there aren't many, the only prerequisite is that you must have a familiarity with navigating the world wide web. In other words, you have to be able to use a web browser. Now that's not too onerous a set of pre requisites. This course is not specific to Windows, is not specific to Macintosh, not specific to any one web publishing package like Dreamweaver or FrontPage so you need to have no particular skills in those packages or in those operating systems. You don't need to have any particular technical skills, although if you have some prior technical experience using computers that would be of benefit, but it’s not a pre requisite. This course takes you in from first principles. I guess you could say there is a co requisite to this course. This course as I said does not teach you html, it does not teach you Microsoft FrontPage or any of the other packages involved in publishing websites. So I suggest that you get one if you don't already have one. I suggest that you use this course in conjunction with another course that teaches you the specifics of each tool that you plan to use. This course will tell you how to build the table but it won't tell you how to hold a hammer. 

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