NMD 340
Design Websites
Use WordPress to create stunning portfolios to showcase your creative work
Overview
Web Design for personal and community goals
Create Web pages or simple apps with compelling designs and interactive features. Review basic graphic design, HTML, CSS, simple PHP and web architecture tools like WordPress to expand your skills. Learn critical skills for collaboration, negotiation and team work, and apply these to tell a digital story that represents your creative work and goals.
Prerequisites: New Media Majors. NMD foundations & NMD 345 recommended.
Credits: 3
Creating a Portfolio
Show off all of your New Media, Art, and Business skills in your portfolio. Use course projects to develop more portfolio work. Don’t wait until you leave school to showcase your work, or find good portfolio projects.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.."
Albert Einstein
"Dream. Seriously. Don't betray your dreams for the sake of fitting in. Dreaming is one of humanities greatest gifts. It champions aspiration, spurs innovation, leads to change, and propels the world forward. Dream big!"
Richard Branson
Hone your skills
Once you hone your skills in NMD 340, you can take NMD 440, our client-based internship style course to create websites for clients.
Working with clients will help you establish good communication and people skills, grow your network, get the word out about the need to hire New Media grads, and give you a taste of possible future internships and employment.
You may also want to consider clients in your own community to add to our class list.
Tools
Below are some tools you will use to create websites
Learn web design basics, interact with servers, use FTP protocols, develop a design process, and generate robust content for your career portfolio.
With web hosting, you get maximum control and customization.
Broader design control comes with knowing some code so you understand web design structure and logic.
Learn HTML for structure, CSS for style and position, and PHP to for database interactivity.
WordPress is open source software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog, or app. Design structure with themes, templates, kits and page builders, build powerful functions with plug ins, and control all your content.
We will be using the Astra or similar theme for basic layout, and the Elementor page builder to design robust, flexible sites without code.
Elementor allows you to set global styles, fonts and colors, and copy content, styles and templates across pages.
Develop real working relationships while working on your degree
When you graduate, you will have both a portfolio to show off your New Media skills, and if you continue with clients, you will also have real working relationships with clients, thus building your career networks.
Connect
Learn robust tools and connect with a growing New Media Network of peers.
Get Started
Work Due
NMD Resources
@2024 JBlais
UMaine New Media