Do traditional approaches to composing texts suit the new purposes and possibilities of the World Wide Web? What is new about the relationships between people across web spaces, what rhetorical strategies do new texts and new means of interaction require, and what new meanings are possible? This course approaches web design primarily as a rhetorical matter involving interpretation, negotiation, and collaboration between composers and readers of web texts. The primary goal will be to build on our existing rhetorical skills to become more resourceful designers of meaning in multimodal contexts—that is, in environments that allow us to compose texts not only of language, but also image, sound, and spatial relations.
In addition to academic and technical work, this course also integrates a required service learning component around which you will design a web site as your final project. The service learning element of the course provides a rich context for web design that offers opportunities to imagine and compose web texts that aren’t limited to the classroom in their scope, purposes, and audiences. In building up to the final project, we will cover the basics of HTML and CSS (the primary languages used to compose web pages) and address some of the social issues involved in human-computer-human interactions. Readings will provide critical framing for our web designs and help us to think consciously about what is novel about writing for the web. Throughout the quarter we will be analyzing existing web pages, as well as each others’ web pages, to think critically about how they make use of convention and variation to respond to their rhetorical contexts and achieve their rhetorical purposes.