Taught Elective: Dreamweaver

As a competent PC user who creates simple websites in MS FrontPage, I was readily able to transfer my previous knowledge to an alternative operating system and software. I am also a part time (but somewhat reluctant) Mac user, and indeed have trained others to use them in the past, but I know that I am more hesitant on the Mac as I can't make it sing in the way I can my more familiar OS. This creates tensions and frustrations, as I am not only coming to terms with a new piece of software, but am doing it in an alien environment.

Fortunately for my sanity, most of the work I have done away from NSAD has been on my PC, so the issue of the operating system becomes somewhat irrelevant as the software is broadly similar on both platforms.

Having worked through the taught sessions I could see how the principles of web authoring which I already had under my belt could be transferred from FrontPage to Dreamweaver. I knew that I needed to produce a site quite quickly, and I had high expectations of what its look and feel would be. Therein lay the problem: I was punching above my weight and wanted more than I could deliver to myself in the time allocated for the Unit.

I decided that, at this point in time, it was more important for me to produce an acceptable-looking site than it was to learn a new piece of software from the bottom up, so I took the decision to base my site on a third party template.

I knew from previous experience that this is not automatically the easy route, as hacking into someone else's template in order to personalise it means that one comes across all manner of tricks and protocols which simply wouldn't rear their heads when building a simple site from scratch. However, I felt confident that I would be able to deal with these, (having chosen a relatively straight forward template) and I knew from using this approach before that it would actually serve to familiarise me with the software, albeit it in a somewhat haphazard way.

Furthermore, I do understand, from a pedagogical point of view, that this approach leaves the learner wide open to the risk of creating huge gaps in the prerequisite skills and techniques - for example building a page using frames, or creating a CSS. As a teacher I know the importance of constructing a scaffold of knowledge, skills and understanding and my parachute approach flies in the face of this.

It is my intention (indeed, I have already begun) to go back to square one and build another site from the bottom up.

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