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CIW Website Design Manager.

I chose Scheidegger for no other reason than they were fairly forward with the sell and it sounded like a course I was looking for. It is mostly home study and the examinations can be arranged locally.

I enquired about the course via their web-site and within a few days had a call to arrange a visit by a course adviser (salesman). He duly turned up and did his, obviously, rehearsed monologue. Despite this he came across as a genuine kind of guy and the course sounded promising. It’s not cheap – £2,500 which can be eased by a sponsorship deal which provides an interest-free option to pay it up.

Internet Fundamentals Section 1 – Part A

This is the first part of the course and shouldn’t present any kind of a challenge to anyone with a general knowledge of computers and the World Wide Web.

It covers the history of the Internet and the birth of the World Wide Web, Browser basics, security and email. It covers the use and purpose of protocols such as HTTP, FTP, Gopher and Telnet.

Having flipped ahead, this section does not even mention web design so I think I may need to be patient. The practical examples use Internet Explorer and Netscape which are not provided but easily available.

This section is fundamental – I have completed the first two assessment which comprise 20 questions and I can honestly say that only 2 answers came from reading the notes. The rest I knew already.

I hope to update this page regularly with my thoughts on the course and feedback about Scheidegger. If you are thinking about studying web design then watch this space.

The idea being, of course, that you will be able to judge my progress by the improvements with this web site.

Internet Fundamentals Section 1 – Part B

In this section we begin to code HTML covering the very basics and moving on to Tables, Forms and Frames. At no point could one describe it as rocket science but it covered the essentials. Towards the end it covered CSS, Javascript, DHTML and XML (XHTML) but this was given extremely cursory treatment.

I didn’t like some of the assignments which gave you a piece of HTML code and you had to pick the picture of the resulting page image that matched the code. In one case the only difference between 2 images was the font size. How do you determine what is Verdana size 2 is from a picture? I typed the code out and viewed in Internet Explorer and NetScape and got a result midway between the 2 given answers. This is not evaluating a student’s understanding of the concepts.

 

I started out with the intention of making this page a rough overview of the course, but quickly realised I would need more than a single page to accomplish this. In fact, I was going to need a whole site so I abandoned this page and did just that.

You can see the results of my toils at CIW Course in a Nutshell.

 

Are Scheidegger any good?

A question, it seems, many people are asking. My attempt to answer this requires more space than I have available here, so check out my "Unbiased Opinion" page from my CIW Course in a Nutshell Website. OK, it’s not truly unbiased, but I tried to be as dispassionate as possible.