Website Creation Course

Websites are increasingly the marketing tool of choice for visual artists, photographers and filmmakers, and not being online or having a weak online presence risks losing out on this opportunity. Most potential clients will start with google when they want to find or research a recommendation, and your website is likely to be the first "point of call" for these potential clients and is responsible for that all important first impression.

This course is specifically aimed at visual artists who would like to, at the end of the 2 day training, have a fully functioning, fully customisable website that will not only be visually appealing, instantly searchable and easy to manage, but also a site that will work on several levels - an image / catalogue that sells, a portfolio that entices, a platform to deliver news and opinion in the form of a blog.

Course Outline

On Day 1 you will learn the fundamentals of setting up a website using both online web applications, and free open-source web apps that are installed on hosted servers. We will take you through the platform options and show you how to get started with advice on concept, audience, design and layout. You will learn to embed multimedia, make your content stand out on search engines, and connect your site with social media. You will also learn how to optimise your images/video/audio for web display and learn fundamental actions that will automate processes saving you hours and hours of work:

* optimise images for web using photoshop batch actions
* create a website on wordpress.com
* create on-line photo galleries using Flickr
* tagging images in Flickr
* creating RSS and xml feeds
* add videos and audio to your site
* add google analytics code to track the visitors to your site
* create and edit templates to define the look of your site
* using widgets and plugins to extend the functionality of your site (creating shopping cart functionality, Newsletters Subscription)

The focus on Day 2 will be the creation of your own website using your preferred system, with personalised, one-on-one advise and support from the tutor. Typical areas covered, but not limited to will be:

* Installing Wordpress on servers
* Configuring server using cpanel for email accounts and other services
* Configuring your Wordpress site
* Layout and site presentation with Themes
* Template Code and how they work (HTML and CSS)
* Content creation with posts, pages and menu navigation
* Adding WordPress Plugins (extensions for the WordPress software that can extend the functionality of your website)

Lesson Structure:
Project-led practical exercises

Entry Requirements:
No previous experience is necessary. Students should be fluent in English.

Tutor:
Pierre Vella is an independent digital creative working in film, video and digital technologies. He is a founding member of MITA (Moving Image Training Alliance) and runs a series of training programmes in film and video post-production, web technologies and motion graphics in London and Cambridge.

General
Preferably, students should bring their own work with them to use on this course. If this is not possible, dummy content will be available for students to use. Those wishing to have their own domain name (www.yourname.com) and hosted server will need to bring a credit / debit card with them to make these purchases. The cost of this is very minimal, approx. £20 for 1 year.

Each student will be provided with their own workstation and can discuss any specific areas of interest they may have toward the end of each day with the tutor.