Posts Tagged ‘Omniversity’

New CSS courses at the Omniversity

Friday, August 24th, 2012

This autumn the Omniversity will be running two CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) courses: CSS Basics and Advanced CSS.

CSS enables web developers to create imaginative, beautiful and accessible websites. CSS makes it easy to change the style of a website and by separating style and layout from basic HTML content, reduces server bandwidth requirements, ensuring faster downloads.

Both courses will be run by Chris Mills, open standards evangelist, tech writer and developer relationship manager at Opera Software. Chris edits dev.opera.com and writes articles on open-web technologies for his own site A List Apart, .net magazine and more. He is the author of Practical CSS3: Develop and Design (Peachpit Press, 2012) and co-authored Interact with Web Standards (New Riders, 2010).
(more…)

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September 2012 at Omniversity

Wednesday, August 8th, 2012

September is back to school at the Omniversity with some brilliant upcoming courses. Kicking-off the semester is the ‘Beginners’ Guide to Arduino and Physical Computing’ course on Saturday September 1st from 10 am – 5:30 pm.

Join in and learn everything you ever needed to know about working with the Arduino platform – from software development to building robotics. No previous experience is required. Once the basics have been covered, you’ll learn ways of actively incorporating these new skills into future projects of your own, whatever the application might be, from creating art installations to kick-starting the robot apocalypse.

Check out our Arduino video if you want to get a bit of a taste for it:

Beginners’ Guide to Arduino and Physical Computing – An Omniversity Course from Prohyena on Vimeo.

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CSS Basics

Sunday, June 24th, 2012

CSS Basics

Title: CSS Basics at the Omniversity
Location: MadLab
Description: This course looks in detail at Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the language used to add styling and layout to your HTML content.
Date: 13-10-2012
Start Time: 10:00
End Time: 17:30
Booking: Sign up here








This course looks in detail at the basics of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the language used to add styling and layout to your web content. You will learn fundamental CSS theory such as the box model, the cascade and specificity, how to effectively style your paragraphs, lists, tables, forms, navigation menus and other content, and the basics of layouts using floats and positioning. This session also covers some CSS3 features like shadows, border radius and CSS3 selectors.

The course is aimed mainly at novice web designers and developers but it is also suitable for those with more experience who want to update their skills and learn modern best practices.

What you need to be familiar with

This course is intended for beginners to CSS so while prior knowledge would help, none is required. You should however have a reasonable knowledge of HTML and how to use the web.

Learning outcomes

After completing the class, you will have learned:

  • The fundamentals of how CSS works and what you can do with it
  • A solid array of techniques you can use to style and lay out content
  • Up-to-date web design best practices
  • Some cutting edge CSS3 features

Equipment you’ll need

  • Yourself. Refreshments will be provided.
  • A laptop of some kind. Mac, Windows or Linux is fine.
  • A decent text editor – this is all you need to build web pages. We recommend:

    Note: You can use an expensive web creator tool like Dreamweaver, should you have one installed. But expect to use it to edit code, not drag and drop.

  • A graphics package – we will be talking a little bit about graphics for the web, as far as different formats, and resizing images are concerned. It would make sense for you to have a graphics package available. We recommend:
  • The latest available web browsers (all free). We’d recommend:
  • An FTP program, which is used to upload your web page files up to the web, so they can then be viewed by others on the web. We recommend:

Costs and times

The course costs £100. You will receive an electronic copy of the teaching materials, software, and programmes. You will also receive free hosting courtesy of MadLab to test and refine your site. Lunch and refreshments are provided.

Further information

CSS Basics course syllabus

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Intermediate WordPress

Friday, June 22nd, 2012

WordPress for Beginners

Title: Intermediate WordPress
Location: MadLab
Description: A hands-on intermediate course to polish your WordPress website.
Start Date: 02-02-2013
End Date: 03-02-2013
Start Time: 10:00
End Time: 16:30
Booking: Sign up here








WordPress is the publishing platform of choice for more than 73 million websites and blogs – including some of the most high-profile sites in the world. It has a Content Management System (CMS) market share of 54%.

This intermediate course takes your WordPress site to the next level. You will learn how to thoroughly customise themes, find the right plugin for your needs, understand the different requirements for mobile platforms (smartphones/ tablets) and unleash the full power and potential of this CMS platform. Mike’s hands-on course will teach you WordPress best practice, SEO strategies, security tips and caching techniques. You’ll get started with e-commerce and find out about little-known and useful features of WordPress – and all from the man who helped create it in the first place.

Who will benefit from this class?

You may already have a WordPress site or two and you want yours to be better than the rest.

You may be contemplating spending several thousand pounds on hiring a developer/ designer for your new company website.

Total beginners should go on our WordPress for Beginners course.

What you need to be familiar with

If you want to work on an existing WordPress site you are more than welcome, but we will provide a pre-installed site for up to a month for all attendees.

This course is aimed at those who’ve already got to grips with the WordPress CMS. You’ll don’t need any programming experience, but a little CSS knowledge is useful.

Course syllabus

Day one

  1. Introduction To WordPress: What is WordPress? A little history
  2. Recap of the WordPress basics: Posts, pages and all that jazz
  3. Settings in depth: More ways to configure your site
  4. Advanced posts and pages: Featured images, the kitchen sink, paging and more
  5. Exercise: Getting to grips with the WordPress Editor
  6. The Image Editor: Make your own thumbnails
  7. Themes, Widgets and Menus in depth: Learning the building blocks
  8. CSS introduction: An overview and some useful tools
  9. Pulling it all together: Improving the look of your site
  10. Exercise: Customising your theme with CSS

Day two

  1. Security: Hosting, plugins and good habits
  2. Caching: Make your site fly!
  3. Exercise: Security and caching plugins
  4. SEO – an overview: The strange art of Search Engine Optimisation
  5. Anti-spam techniques: Akismet and beyond
  6. Jetpack in depth: Juicy goodness form WordPress.com
  7. Exercise: Getting to know Jetpack
  8. E-commerce – an overview: An intro to selling your stuff
  9. More useful tools and plugins

Equipment you’ll need

  • Please bring a laptop computer with Windows, Linux or Mac OS installed. You will not need to install any software, but you should have a modern web browser. Our preference is for the latest version of Firefox or Google Chrome, but the latest Internet Explorer or Opera will be fine too
  • For part of the course you will need Firefox or Google Chrome
  • You may want to bring some sample images that you will be able to upload to your website as the course progresses
  • If you feel more comfortable using an external mouse, please bring one with you

Learning outcomes

After completing the class, you will have:

  • In-depth knowledge about WordPress configuration
  • A suite of plugins to enhance your site to your needs
  • The ability to configure WordPress to your preferences
  • The ability to use industry-standard developer tools
  • An understanding of site security and Search Engine Optimisation
  • Practical knowledge of advanced plugins

This is a very practical hands-on course where you will complete exercises, ask questions and engage in discussions to make the most of the time.

Costs and times

The course costs £200. You will receive an electronic copy of the teaching materials, software, and programmes. You will also receive one month’sfree hosting courtesy of MadLab to test and refine your site. Lunch and refreshments are provided.

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vvvv is coming back

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

3D projection-mapping pro Elliot Woods is coming back to the Omniversity to run vvvv + MapTools again later this year. When we’ve held this course in the past, attendees have come from local digital and creative agencies, from universities – and from as far away as Sweden and Canada!

Here’s Elliot with a few words on what 3D projection mapping is:

“It’s the act of re-projecting a virtual 3D object onto its real world counterpart using a video projector, whereby all the features of the real object which are visible from the point of view of the projector have an image projected onto them, and this image is ‘extracted’ from the corresponding surfaces of the virtual counterpart object. Augmenting the virtual object then results in an implicit augmentation of the real world object.”

Elliot’s now gearing up for hosting his third course at MadLab by releasing a tutorial on createdigitalmotion.com.

We’re still confirming dates as Elliot is working between Manchester and South Korea, but the course is likely to take place in late summer or early autumn. Please take a few seconds to register your interest here and we’ll keep you up-to-date.

And finally, here’s a short video shot during our last vvvv + Map Tools course:

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