Pam Van Londen, Author
I started drawing when I was 12 years old and created my first major graphic design project at age 17. I hold a Bachelor’s Degree in Art and a Master’s Degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from Western Oregon University. See my résumé. See my vita. I teach Web Design, Web Management, Computer Science Ethics, and Gender and Technology courses at Oregon State University. I think in web pages, so most of the materials for these courses are provided in websites which allow quick linking, accessibility, clean printing, and interactive instructions to aid learning.
I have provided marketing, print, and online design for a variety of small to large businesses, including Apple, Microsoft, Oregon State University, and Oregon Raspberry & Blackberry Commission. I sell paintings on online marketplaces such as Etsy, Fine Art America, and Amazon.
Over the years, I have designed my own themes when a client needs something completely customized. Some of those sites required modification of PHP and JS and all of them required extensive CSS modifications. I tend to write in Code view rather than WYSIWYG so that I can better control the design of floating and spacing.
The Textbook
This textbook website is hosted on a Bluehost server running the latest version of WordPress. The page layout is based on the Twenty-Fifteen theme, which is responsive to mobile devices. It provides the dynamic sidebar on the left and the full-height content on the left, which reduces scrolling. The color, typography, galleries, dynamic tabs, other design customizations are made using the Customizer CSS editor, Code Colorer plugin, and various shortcodes. Fonts, users, tools, settings, shortcodes, content blocks, links, and quizzes are managed by various plugins. Security is managed with Wordfence. SEO is managed by Comet Cache, WP-Optimize, Score Booster, and ShortPixel. These components greatly reduce the amount of code to write so I can concentrate on writing lessons.
Three units provide enough content for three separate courses: Web Design (for adult beginners), Web Management (experience required), and Interactive (experience required). Lessons are based on real-world skills that take you from web server set up to finished product in 11 weeks. Chapters are broken into weekly sets of lessons which can be completed in about an hour each. The courses teach the use of HTML, CSS, PHP, and Javascript libraries to write semantic markup, add efficiencies, create dynamic components, and style typography, images, page layout, and navigation systems. Lessons come with lecture/introduction/purpose materials, resources, scoring criteria, quizzes, and step by step lessons for Markup, Style, and Functions.
Write to me if you want to adopt the textbook for your highschool or college courses.