Speak my language...

Upon launching the video series, we are met with the trainers rather deep and playful accent. Each of the videos consists of camatasia generated screen captures to give us an "over the shoulder" presentation so we can see exactly what is happening within the Kompozer interface and why.  Narration from the trainer is easy to follow and understand as the existence of complex HTML jargon is practically non existent.

This makes for a very relaxed viewing session that is easy to digest and understand, website design and HTML coding are certainly not my strong points and I was more than happy that at no point in the videos did I have to pause and rewind to try and understand what was being said or what was being shown on the screen.  This is a serious testiment to the trainer as I have previously struggled to grasp some concepts with the free video offerings scattered around the internet, but thankfully this was in plain english, to the point and extremely easy to follow.

After installing Kompozer and taking the walk through, I was ready to get into the "meat" of the video training.  I had used Kompozer before but was kinda drawing a blank on what the buttons did and what each of the menu functions accomplished,  I wasn't even sure how to get some of the hidden features to show on the screen.  Thankfully this ignorance was short lived after watching video 3 and 4, quick walk through and program setup.

Show me the Design..

By the time video 5 was upon me I had Komozer installed and configured to my liking.  I also had enabled some hidden features I wasn't aware the product had.  Then it was time to create a proper multi-column layout.  
We are taken through exactly how to plan the website before diving in blind and creating a layout that would either look horrible or cause untold confusion to our visitors.  Multi-column layouts were unknown territory for me at this point as all I had really dabbled in before were sales pages and squeeze pages, and not very good ones at that.  
Seeing how easy it actually was (with a little thought and planning) to create a multi column layout was actually quite embaressing to start with.  Then I just reminded myself that out of my IT skillsets, web design was never one of them, so I stopped punishing myself and watched on.

Knights of the Data Table

Data tables were next to be covered in video 6 and 7. I have to admit that every data table I had tried to create beforehand always ended up squint, or mis-aligned or disappeared off the page altogether and I could never really understand why that was.  After learning about a container and how to setup things like cushions and spacing, I began to see where I had gone wrong in the past and started to truly understand table layout and selection, sizing and placements.  All the fundamentals of getting my pictures and text into the places where I wanted them on my page were now clear in my head...Finally.

This was truly shaping up to be my perfect solution to me being a complete HTML dunce.

CSS Is A 3 Letter Word

Video 8,9 and 10 were all about CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets. Yet another phrase I had heard of relating to web design, but didn't really know what it was or how to implement them.
In a nutshell, CSS is the technique of allocating certain attributes to different parts of your web page.  If you want your H1 code to be a certain size, font and color. then you create a CSS for it. This can be done for any element of your web page.  The overall goal is to simplify the management of your web page.  Instead of having to enter everything in plain text, then go through it all again applying changes to font, color size, alignment etc.  You simply create the CSS for each of the elements you wish to have the same, then start to design your page afterwards. The amount of time it saves alone is impressive and even though it can be a little tricky to get your head round to start with, once you grasp the idea, it's an absolute breeze to generate individual styles prior to putting your web pages together.

Template for successful design

Using templates for creating web pages is covered in video 11.  I didn't realise this at the time but the number of HTML templates available on Google is nothing short of mind boggling (type it into Google and look at the number of results that come back).  Template useage creates a bit of a division between site designers.  Some say that templates should never be used as you won't "learn anything" useful by implementing them in your site.  The other side of the arguement is that the existence of templates offer both a visual and "code" representation of what the site looks like when it is first downloaded from the host of the theme.  Most templates if they have been well creaeted will allow any aspect of the page to be changed, depending on you, implementing a website can now just take a few minutes which is great as a time saver.  However I come from the "watch and learn" camp so I don't personally believe in site templates but each person is different.

 I will leave the decision to you whether you use templates or not


And Last But Not Least...

VIdeo 12 shows you how to use the built in publishing feature of Kompozer. This will actually allow you to connect to your webhost FTP with a few clicks of the mouse within the Kompozer program. This is not only an excellent timesaver but also allows you to save all your secure information (usernames/passwords) within Kompozer so there is no need for an external application to do the same..
It should be mentioned at this point that for a free product, Kompozer really is feature loaded and contains other tools and modules that under normal circumstanes would only be inciuded in the commercial solutions.

For the price of these videos and the quality of the screen recordings and narration you can't go far wrong. I know that sounds far fetched and hypey, if you have ever stared at those mesmerisingly clever or well designed websites on the internet today and wished you could do that yourself, then the Konquer Kompozer video training series will give you the solid foundation you need to be able to understand the basics of HTML and CSS and show you how to create your first website.  The value for money here is tremendous if you take into account that there is no monthly subscription fee for these videos, just pay your money and download the course, and the rest is down to you. 

To be completely honest with you, before doing this course and practicing the techniques in it, the best website I came up with was a sales page here. Pretty awful I think you'll agree.

(As a side note, once I have time I will be updating the above page with a new design using techniques from this very course - please check back at a later date if you wish to see the final result.)