Do students really need to know HTML to design websites anymore? Or, more specifically, do they need to know the detailed minutia of the <!doctype> tag and the proper syntax for linking an external style sheet? Or even more specifically, do students who are not web design majors need to know anything more than the concept of html & css, and the basics of editing them?
I’m currently in the middle of teaching a thee week unit on website design in Information Design, a 2000 level course that serves as the intro to document design principles for English Writing majors. On Tuesday’s class we began the unit by me sending them into Dreamweaver to do some direct html coding combined with some WYSIWYG work. At the end of the day students were frustrated. As one put it, “all of the sites I’m going to for ideas look really slick, but mine is just so, well, blah.” And she had a point. At the end of three weeks working with Dreamweaver they would be lucky to have a website with 1996-level complexity.
So on Thursday I changed tactics. I encouraged students who wanted to learn html in depth to continue coding inside of Dreamweaver. But I let students who didn’t see themselves doing this in the long run start using more template-based systems like WordPress, Blogger, webs.com, and iWeb. The result: students were much more satisfied with their work, more proud of what they accomplished, and more motivated to keep going. Their sites were at a 2010-level complexity.
Now, the response is that these more templatic systems are too constraining. There’s not the freedom of choice that enables true document design principles to be applied. I’m still struggling with that one. I’m not sure how the WordPress sites will be graded from a doc design standpoint. But right now I’m leaning toward a caveat that if the student uses a template for a design, they have to explain in depth why they used that particular one and what its strengths and weaknesses are. That at least gets them to think critically about their site’s design even if they didn’t create it from scratch.
But this brings up a larger issue. Do students who aren’t web design majors really need to learn how to design from scratch? They won’t take enough courses to master css, javascript, and the like before they finish college. So will we be sending them out into the world with antiquated design skills that won’t satisfy an employer? And we need to ask ourselves, do they really need to know the details of <div> layouts? Will they ever need to design an entire website from scratch? Do their future job descriptions ever include that duty?
Or would they be better served with a web design curriculum that starts off with a templatic system and focuses on content development and organization, rhetorical strategies for promotion, and adaptation of the template for their needs? Would they be better served by leap frogging the 15 years worth of coding history that they would need to learn to produce a website acceptable in today’s Internet culture?
I’m definitely leaning in this direction.