Tech Learning Collective

Technology education for radical organizers and revolutionary communities.

Foundations of Web Design and Development

Due to the loss of our physical venues during the COVID-19 pandemic, Tech Learning Collective course enrollment is paused. While you can still begin the enrollment process, please be aware that no future cohorts are scheduled at this time. Instead, we encourage you to participate in an a la carte workshop. View and subscribe to our events calendar to learn about upcoming virtual workshops.

Apply for pre-enrollment in WEB101

You use them every day, but do you really know what a website is made of? Does creating simple visual effects like text layers or auto-scaling images with CSS still feel more like magic than designing? Although Web design and development methodologies have advanced far beyond their original days, the fundamentals of Web technologies like HTML and CSS have not changed much. It’s still important to write semantically-meaningful markup and design the look and feel of those pages using simple, maintainable stylesheets. Unfortunately, it’s harder than ever to find a good introduction to the basics: where should you use an <article> and where should you use a <section>, what is a CSS formatting context, how do you find an element’s most recently positioned ancestor, and why does that matter?

In this course, students will solidify their understanding of the most important—and most often overlooked—parts of Web fundamentals. Starting from the structure of HTML and extending to the richness of semantic data formats like Microdata and RDFa, learn how to publish any information on the Web. From simple typography to modern CSS layouts, students will master the in-browser development tools so that by the end of the course, students will not only have created a fully-functional web site but will also know how to debug any rendering issue they encounter.

As a supplement (or taste test) of the WEB101 course intensive, consider attending one or more of the following related workshops. These are stand-alone free, by-donation, or low-cost events that are either derived from or augment this course’s material. Since they are taught by the same instructor(s) as this course, these workshops provide a low-commitment way to get a feel for the fuller course itself as well as offer a chance for you to meet some of our teaching team.

Learn more about Tech Learning Collective workshops from our Workshops and Webinars FAQ.