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Texts and Materials
You might already have a lot of what you need for this course. Whatever you do, don't go out right away and spend any money on software or hardware until you talk to me. All product icons below are hyperlinked to their manufacturers (images are the property of the manufacturers).
Research Web sites
This course has no single assigned textbook. Instead, we will access a large number of professional and academic Web sites for research articles, advice, tips and best practices regarding page and site construction. Monthly syllabi and all assignments have the various relevant texts hyperlinked. Throughout the semester, you will be surfing the Web continually as we critique various types of sites. This is the best way to learn Web design.
Webopedia, for example, is an invaluable resource. "The only online dictionary and search engine you need for computer and Internet technology." I often use Webopedia as my first approach to any technical research problem related to Web design, the internet, or computers in general. I highly recommend Webopedia.
Without a doubt, Google is the best search engine currently operating. Use it to search for anything and everything you may need for this course (and everything else).
"A comprehensive illustrated encyclopedia of Web technology, The WDVL is a well-organized goldmine of tutorials, examples, and links to great resources. It's for Webmasters, Web designers and Internet developers who are creating Web sites with HTML, CGI, Java, JavaScript, DHTML, CSS, graphics, VRML, multimedia, animation, scripting, etc."
As noted in Wikipedia, "W3Schools is a web developer's portal, with tutorials and references relating to web development subjects, including HTML, XML, CSS, and JavaScript. W3Schools is free of charge, and is funded through text and display advertising. The tutorials and references on the web site and the related code are proprietary."
By the way, don't confuse the W3Schools.com 
with the W3C.org (World Wide Web Consortium, at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts ). As noted on the W3C.org home page:
"The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperabletechnologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and
Visit the W3C.org ; I think you will find their site very interesting.
Required External Storage Media
I can't tell you the number of times I've seen students "lose" their Web files.
To insure that you don't have to start all over again, back up your entire Web after every session. Use an external USB flash2.0 drive, a CD, or DVD disc as a storage medium.
your Web to various media in the early part of the course. In fact, you will be reviewing a PowerPoint tutorial on this issue: Web Site Directory Structure. As a general rule, however, you cannot save your Web too many times: on your workstation intermittently, on the server, on your M: drive, and on your USB flash drive.
Save early and often. You will never regret it....
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Dreamweaver CS4 Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
Bentley has Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 installed on computers in the Smith Technology Center. If you want to purchase a copy, make sure your computer can handle it. See me to discuss the specifications.
In this course you will use Dreamweaver CS4 to create and maintain your site. But you could also use WordPad, Notepad, Microsoft Expression , HTML Kit , and various other XHTML utilities, as all applications have their advantages and disadvantages.
Remember, the object of this course is not to learn particular software. It's to learn the fundamental principles of Web design, creation, and maintenance.
DWCS4 Companion Guidebook
This course has a no textbook assigned.
If, however, you would like to master some of the intricacies and quirks of Dreamweaver, I recommend your purchasing David McFarland's Dreamweaver CS: The Missing Manual , as it has many helpful hints for even experienced Dreamweaver designers.
If you already are very familiar with Dreamweaver, you may not need this kind of guidebook. At any rate, IDCC 370 is run as a lab, so most of your questions will be taken care of during class.
The book is available on-line from either Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com. Please let me know if you have any difficulty purchasing a copy.
Microsoft Office Products
While Dreamweaver has good editing capabilities, you may want to prepare your text files in MS Word; that way you can take advantage of Word's more powerful editing capabilities. You should then save these Word-produced files as unformatted .txt files, not as MS HTML files.
Though Word can save HTML, the files produced are often bloated __ full of unnecessary proprietary and CSS formatting markup. Sometimes the files are four or five times larger than they need to be. Dreamweaver also has the ability to strip out the extra Word formatting, in case you forget to save your Word file as a simple text document.
In fact, all Office products are capable of fairly good operating renditions of WYSIWYG XHTML, but like Word, all produce bloated, exceptionally large files. So do not use any of this software to "produce" your XHTML files for assignments in this course, unless I specifically authorize you to do so.
Modern Browsers
A good browser is key to the whole enterprise. Browsers handle XHTML tags and CSS differently, so you need to test your files in both. I have a bias toward Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox (as do many programmers and Web developers) simply because they are ubiquitous, fast, and allow for 
much more dynamic possibilities, especially in regard to cascading style sheets (css), dynamic XHTML (DHTML), and XHTML parsing.
But don't sell Opera, Google Chrome, or Apple Safari short. They are very solid and stable products that handle CSS, DHTML, and XML correctly. Opera, in fact, tends to be the one browser that renders CSS most faithfully. 
Standards compliance is saving all the browsers (and all of us Web developers and designers).
These product iconsare linked to the download pages. In designing your Web pages, you should make sure that they render well in all these browsers.
Graphics Editing Software
A good graphics editing program should be high on your list of software "musts" if you ever pursue design seriously. The Web is visual (multi-media), so you need to create and edit JPEG and GIF files. Menus, navigation bars, photographs, illustrations, animations, background art, sound and video clips __ all can be edited with the high-end graphics packages. 
Two of the best are Adobe Photoshop CS and Photoshop Elements.
A word of caution:these packages take a lot of time to learn. Don't spend too much time playing with pretty pictures for this course. . . . For your purposes this semester, Microsoft Office and Dreamweaver will supply all the graphics editing tools you will need. After this course, when you have some spare time, I would recommend that you familiarize yourself with Photoshop CS4 or Elements.