• Home
  • Sustainable Design
• A Sustainable Web?
  • A Foreign Concept
  • Glossary of Terms
• Design Concept
  • The Importance of Visual Design
  • Design Impact
  • Potential Harm of Good Design
  • Getting Started Designing
• Material Treatment
  • You Are How You Treat
  • Naming Files and Folders
  • Naming for Indexing and Clarity
  • Naming for Versioning
  • Mistreating Your Images: 7 Deadly Sins
• Document Structure (XHTML)
  • The Concept of a Markup Language
  • A Brief History of HTML
  • Basic XHTML Rules
  • XHTML DOCTYPE Declarations
  • XHTML Tag Types: Block and Inline
  • The Basic XHTML Tag Set: Block-level Tags
  • The Basic XHTML Tag Set: List Tags
  • The Basic XHTML Tag Set: In-line Tags
• Advanced Document Structure
  • Working with Classes and IDs
  • Classes in Action
  • IDs in Action
• Document Presentation (CSS)
  • Introduction to Cascading Style Sheets
  • Some CSS Vocabulary
  • CSS Selectors
  • CSS Properties: Text and Font
  • CSS Properties: Margin, Padding, and Border
• CSS for Design and Layout
  • Background Images
  • Image Replacement Techniques
• Introduction to PHP
  • What is PHP?
  • Repeating Content Across Pages

Sustainable Design

The resources in these pages are meant to help spread sustainable practices in Web development through rhetorically sound design and W3C-standard XHTML and CSS. But rather than diving in immediately to issues for expert users, this site offers guides on basic, often overlooked issues like file naming.

A guiding assumption behind these resources is that the Web should be an informative, lively place that includes as many individuals as are willing to participate. To that end, most of the resources here offer guidance for implementing sustainable design that may be practiced without any software beyond what's available on every computer sold today: a text editor, like Windows Notepad or Mac OS X's TextEdit.

But a high number of participating individuals is no substitute for sound ethics—both in terms of the content placed on the Web and in terms of the knowledge content creators possess of the technology driving the structure, presentation, and dissemination of Web-available information and expression.

Working Group Sessions Schedule

The Sustainable Web Design resources developed, in part, out of a working group I conducted for teachers and researchers (primarily in Professional Writing and other areas of study in the English department) at Purdue University, my graduate alma mater. I am continuing work on this site as part of my research agenda at Illinois Institute of Technology, where I am an assistant professor of technical communication.

I am willing to travel and present this material. The typical order of sessions I conduct based on this material is roughly:

• Session 1
  1. Site material selection (might be done beforehand and brought to WG)
  2. Reviewing other portfolios online (discovery activity; compile list of group favorites?)
  3. Researching & inventing visual design
  4. Sketching designs
  5. Thinking about technologies & sustainability
• Session 2
  1. Material presentation (image and text treatment)
  2. Material access (complete works, PDFs, etc)
  3. Basic XHTML markup structure
  4. CSS basics (typography and color)
• Session 3
  1. Advanced XHTML markup structure
  2. CSS (color, typography, margin, padding, border)
  3. Some basic PHP
• Session 4
  1. Advanced CSS (position, spacing, image replacement)
  2. PHP - Adding iterable and dynamic page elements
  3. Validating XHTML & CSS
  4. XHTML & CSS for access and printing
  5. Evaluating design

Updated on Wed. Jan. 2 2008 at 01:36PM