In Unit 7 of this course
you will be exploring the wide variety of tools that are available
to help people publish content on the web.
Throughout this course, you have learned to create websites by writing code,
including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Being able to understand websites at a code level is a valuable skill for anyone,
but is especially essential if you might be doing web design or development as part of your future career.
Virtually every organization uses the web to do its work
so knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
are highly desirable and marketable skills for many jobs.
Although it's important to understand the code behind the scenes, let's face it.
Developing all your web pages by hand can be pretty time consuming.
This is why there are a variety of web authoring tools available,
such as Kompozer and Adobe Dreamweaver.
Web authoring tools allow you to create a web page using a familiar, easy-to-use interface,
much like a word processing program.
Just type in your text, select a few options from the menu or toolbar,
and all of the code gets written for you on the back-end.
Most web authoring tools these days create valid, standards-compliant code,
but you might still want to do some editing to the code the tool generates
and most tools provide you with the ability to switch back and forth between a visual design view...
Code view...
or a split view where you can work with both views simultaneously.
All of the features of web pages that you've been learning to code by hand
can be done through menus, buttons, and dialog boxes with these tools.
You can also get that perfect look and feel
by selecting different options from a dialog box, rather than typing in CSS code from scratch.
These tools also provide a rich variety of other features for managing websites,
including automatically uploading changes to your site
as well as letting you view the relationships between pages.
Also, there are a growing number of tools available on-line
that enable novice users to create websites simply by selecting a template
and entering their content into web-based form fields.
This includes content management systems such as Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress...
Blogging software such as Movable Type and Blogger...
Wiki software such as MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia…
And other website publishing tools such as Google Sites and Yahoo! SiteBuilder.
This unit will give you an opportunity to explore each of these tools and services,
and to consider their implications for careers in web design and development.
What are the implications?
With all of these tools available to help people and organizations
to create and manage websites without knowing anything about HTML...
does that mean everything you've learned in this course has been a waste of time?
Not at all!
Each of the tools and services described in this lesson ultimately delivers content to the browser
in HTML, stylized with CSS, with behavior added using JavaScript.
As long as there's a World Wide Web, these technologies will likely be at the heart of that Web,
and there will always be a demand for people who understand these technologies.