Suggestions about building an advanced web design course?

I need suggestions for an advanced web design course that will be implemented for a college course. Some examples are divs and CSS layouts, creating a blog, image gallery or simple ecommerce site. This course is targeted for designers in mind, without or little programming experience. Any of your suggestions is very much appreciated.

Suggestions about building an advanced web design course?
Start at the beginning! Make sure they understand the internet and it's standards. You would not believe the number of people who fail to grasp the standard box model. And how many people can't differentiate tag markup and programming.





Also be sure to cover the use of tools and modules. There are many great software sites out there that require very little modification for many projects, but many first time developers want to create from scratch costing more money and causing more trouble than it's worth.





Also, you might introduce planning. There are many developers out there that try to create a website only to realize that the client didn't want xyz, but abc. Proper planning and documentation can save thousands of dollars and hours of wasted work.





Also, code reuse is very important. There are times where a quick and dirty answer is needed to meet a deadline, but if there is the extra time, creating a slightly more elegant solution will prove essential for future projects to survive.





Another point is data mining. Many industries underestimate the importance of data mining. A simple web tracker can provide a mine full of information if only it is tracked. One such industry is the marketing industry. There is little accountibility in this industry. Most of this is due to lack of tracking the information. One of my projects provided a tracker to a company, and it was immediately apparent that the company was focusing it's efforts in the wrong market area. As soon as the changes were made, their business tripled over a month. Always look for new ways to approach data.





One final note, many developers start out wanting to target every platform and every system. This is not feasible in the real world. Usually your target demographic does not need or want this. There are certain platforms that are a must, such as IE and Mozilla/FireFox, but I have had many companies tell me that they want their employees to use one or the other. In those cases, it is easier to focus on the one platform. On the flip side, don't discount a system because of it's age. There are a suprising number of people still using IE 4. (and even a handful using IE 3 omg) I cut my support off at 4 for practical reasons, but as an example, I was working on a project about two years ago, and I had a customer complain that they couldn't access a critical part of the site, I started testing everything, and it wasn't until I found out he was still using IE 4 that the problem made sense.
Reply:An advanced web design course should be about advanced web design. Ecommerce is a topic that deserves its own class. Commerce over the internet has financial and legal considerations that deserve a full semester worth of lessons.





Part of your course should at the very least cover accessibility and ease of use; they are issues that are often overlooked. The topic has legal ramifications which Target was recently made aware of when a lawsuit against them was raised to class-action status.





http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21119543/





This type of lawsuit is a career killer and could have been avoided with a weeklong discussion of the topic. Despite the many critics of Internet Explorer, they were the pioneers of accessibility in the browser with the release of IE4. You can find out more about how it is implemented at the MSDN website.





http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library...





XHTML has become increasingly popular and necessary for web designers and deserves a week or two on how to implement and use it.





Aside from the aforementioned topics, CSS should probably be the topic discussed most in your class.
Reply:How about designing a shopping cart system for an ecommerce site?