HTML and Me

Years ago, when I was working at Florida Atlantic University, there was an exceptionally good instructor in the IT department who trained faculty and staff on applications ranging from MS Word, to PowerPoint, to Photoshop, to HTML. I sat in her basic classes, and tried to practice whatever I learned. It wasn’t until a few years went by that I was given the “privilege’ of being able to create websites for my department and load them to the site. At that point we used FrontPage, to both create and upload the pages to our server. My method of creating a page was to find one on the web whose style I really liked, copy that part of the code, and paste it into FrontPage. I would then manipulate it using the little bit of HTML I knew, along with the FrontPage editor.

I’ve found it very valuable to know a smattering of code because it has enabled me to review the code and often clean out the garbage that has been added. It was not unusual at that time for FrontPage to add lines and lines of ;nbsp.

At my current job, I am responsible for our campus’ library’s homepage, contacts, information about the library, etc. We must use Ingenuix, a content management system, to create and upload pages. Just recently the college purchased DreamWeaver licenses for faculty and staff, and I’m looking forward to learning it. In theory we may be able to create something interesting, but because so much is locked down within the style options of Ingenuix (fonts, colors, sizes, no flash, etc.), in reality all we have is a little white space and a GUI web editor that makes for some boring web pages.