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Back to How To Create a Website in a Weekend! (Project-Centered Course)

Learner Reviews & Feedback for How To Create a Website in a Weekend! (Project-Centered Course) by The State University of New York

3.3
stars
577 ratings

About the Course

What you’ll achieve: In this project-centered course*, you’ll design, build, and publish a basic website that incorporates text, sound, images, hyperlinks, plug-ins, and social media interactivity. We’ll provide you with step-by-step instructions, exercises, tips, and tools that enable you to set up a domain name, create an attractive layout for your pages, organize your content properly, ensure that your site functions well across different operating systems and on mobile devices, keep your site safe, and finally, let people know your site is online. We’ll even show you how to track your visitors. Throughout the course, you'll engage in collaboration and discussion with other learners through course forums and peer review. Once you complete your first website project using Wordpress, you can move on to our optional, extended module that covers more advanced techniques such as using a simple text editor, coding in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and more. What you’ll need to get started: This project-centered course is designed for learners who have little or no prior experience developing a web site. You will need a computer with a stable Internet connection. We’ll use Wordpress to get you started, provide lots of downloadable examples, and guide you through the process of giving and receiving constructive peer-to-peer feedback. *About Project-Centered Courses: Project-centered courses are designed to help you complete a personally meaningful real-world project, with your instructor and a community of learners with similar goals providing guidance and suggestions along the way. By actively applying new concepts as you learn, you’ll master the course content more efficiently; you’ll also get a head start on using the skills you gain to make positive changes in your life and career. When you complete the course, you’ll have a finished project that you’ll be proud to use and share....

Top reviews

AS

Jul 10, 2020

This was a good experience and a good lesson for me .Which can be helpful in future thanks for giving a different way and perspective on websites.It was first time i felt websites are interesting

TS

Mar 21, 2016

The title of this course is so inspirational that I actually ended up creating a website in a weened. Now I am using course material to enhance it.

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126 - 150 of 201 Reviews for How To Create a Website in a Weekend! (Project-Centered Course)

By Rachel

Mar 20, 2016

Assignments should be free for everyone to try and be peer reviewed! Payment should only affect the certificate.

By Melisa C

Apr 9, 2020

It was not so helpful! I did get information from other websites to make the assignments.

By Qianqiang L

Oct 3, 2016

It's quite simple and doesn't show specific steps of how to do it.

By John W

Feb 12, 2017

Took the mystery out of a few things that were new.

By noman a

Aug 3, 2020

I have learned a lot of things in this course.

By Jan M C

Mar 15, 2016

The links provided are informative.

By Marilyn P

Jun 22, 2020

This "course" should have been -- for its lack of actual instruction, should have been -- a simple bullet list of "The 9 steps to building a website (after you have already mastered WordPress and its Themes, Plugins, and Widgets)." Nothing in this "course" actually told me how to do anything. In the end, I downloaded a book for $10 and learned WordPress on my own during my "weekend" website creation. It took a few more days to test 10 Themes but eventually I made it through. As to the peer review process, that is a total sham. It simply means two women (one, with doctoral degree in music!) put their names to this project to pad their CVs. All while the students are left to float in limbo waiting desperately for other students to "grade" their submissions. For every three-star student work, there were at least three that were woefully ridiculous: no links, links to Wikipedia, links to catalogs, etc. And all the while, the person actually waiting for a real peer review waits and waits.

Back in the day, I worked for the State University of New York; creating a graphic arts department in the Central Administration before computers became a common site on anyone's desktop. I was appalled that SUNY's name was associated with this course. The only reason I gave two and not one star was because the nine steps presented the "how to" in correct order. For some students, that might have been helpful in itself: organizing one's thoughts, doing a story board, etc. Being a stubborn person, once I paid my $29, I finished the course because it amused me to do so and I empathized with other students needing peer reviews to complete the course. The fact the Discussion Board was a list of students begging for peer reviews says it all. There was no learning from peer review.

By Lina U

Apr 1, 2020

The two girls don't even teach much. They just speak about what they plan on telling you, then give you links to read yourself without teaching the stuff itself (some links are outdated and have no content on them) and just bombard you with semi useless/kiddie assignments like 'create a moodboard' or 'pick an aspirational URL'. Like, people??? I'm here to learn how to develop and code child sites on wordpress and learn HTML. This is like a kindergarten!

By Michelle B

May 18, 2016

So basically it cuts off. It's like it gives you part of the information and then drops off. They also speed through it much like my old math teacher in college whcih caused 73% of the class to drop. Now I'm in them mist of it Paid for blue host. Paid for my web name and it looks like I'm going to have to pay someone to finish it. So bascially what I got was a bunch of added on expenses and still no web site. I would not recommend this course.

By Alena Y

Mar 20, 2016

1 out of 10.

A waste of time. If I cannot participate in discussions, forums, submit assignments, or give reviews, I might as well watch youtube lectures.

The course content was very poor as well. (this is based on the unpaid material)

This course should be scrapped and not offered as an unpaid course. Its a classical case of bait and switch.

By Shadi D

Nov 12, 2017

I feel that I put a lot of effort into my first assignments and I wasn't given appropriate feedback considering my background in design compared to peers who only just started learning about website maintenance.

By victoria a

May 14, 2020

It is only centered on using wordpress to create a website, however it doesnt really focus on tools that are applicable in other websited building options.

By carlos o m p

Apr 22, 2020

There is not any teaching resource; not even links were to find accurate information. not any valuable advice to initiate. It is just a list of tasks.

By Rabia R

Aug 28, 2020

Videos should be in start. That will help more If they took place in start of the cource

By Laurent B

Dec 13, 2019

Not enough explanations, direction of the course is rather vague throughout the course.

By Sandeep K

Oct 2, 2016

Taking this course is like getting lost across a ton of different websites!

By Marija K

Jun 23, 2020

Best module was Module 4 made by Coursera employees.

By Jorge I L

Mar 2, 2017

Not really helpfull

By Mofid U

Sep 18, 2023

gvuvuy

By Jennifer R

May 20, 2020

Based on the discussion forums I am not the only person experiencing these issues. First, there seems to be chunks of instruction missing. For example, there is a video explaining a module is about completing the home page, adding hyperlinks, etc. Then the assignment is to add links and submit. There is no instruction at all. That is a repeated cycle. Say something is due then assignment asking for it to be posted. Next, there is no response to posted questions on the discussion forum. I posted a question about an assignment due this week and found the same question posted by someone else a year ago - with no answer. The assignment asks us to submit our home page URL, but our sites are not live yet. We can't submit the site without going live and my site is not ready to go live. There are many many other topics/questions posted with no responses. People are really asking for help and not getting any. (Some, like me, paid for this course. Others did not.)

I write this in the hopes that students enrolled in this course get some help. I have been a big fan of Coursera and have told many people about it. Not sure that will happen going forward, it depends on how this is handled. Everyone makes mistakes, but you need to respond and recover.

By Heather G

Mar 18, 2016

Sorry to say that this is the worst Coursera Course I have ever taken, and I've taken quite a few. The instructors did not do a good job at explaining how to use Wordpress. They didn't explain how to use wordpress to make a website that looked more like a website than a blog. They didn't explain the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org even though they mentioned them both. They talked about hosting but didn't explain how to do it. They mentioned hosting on bluehost but didn't give any instructions. The few tidbits of information that they did give about using wordpress were so brief with no examples. They mentioned Jetpack but didn't say what it was. They didn't explain what benefit adding the social media icons would have or how to link them. And on I could go.

The only good part about this course was the last section where they had guest lecturers, some from Coursera - those were all excellent.

By Ludmila S

Aug 27, 2017

The most useless course I have ever could imagine! Lecture videos are very short and lack of any useful information. All this information may be found in the Internet, no, actually, you will never need this information, because if you gonna make a website on WordPress you will make it your own without prior experience or special knowledge. Or if you will have some problems with your work - WordPress has much better constructed tutorials, than this course.

Had a really awful experience with my classmate - who put me negative grades for assignments just for fun, although I made everything correct. This person was just having fun and himself posted Facebook as the site he has made for the course. So it was not only useless course, but also some very unpleasant experience complains, nerves, my work re-submission and waiting.

By Craig H

Apr 28, 2016

I'm sorry to say this is a poor course. The audio is bad, the sound editing is bad, the "videos" are mainly static slides that sometimes aren't even showing what the audio is talking about. There are no worked examples or annotated slides. As an example, there's no discussion of the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com. The only time that is mentioned is when they touch on plugins, where they say you can't use them if you started with WordPress.com! The additional lectures by guest website designers were the most interesting part, but they were supposed to be after the final project. I just gave up after less than an hour and went and played with WordPress myself. Created a website in 2 days, but with no help from this course.

By Jaime S

Nov 2, 2021

This is my 3rd attempt to this course.

To pretentious to start from the VERY VERY VERY basics of design, with nonsense assigments, i mean, of course its a begginer course, but come on, some task are tedious and have nothing to do with learning how to create a site in wordpress.

Spent hours into working in a .pdf with design guidelines that you are not able to aply to the actual site. And the assignments takes hours or days (in a weekend?) to wait for corrections to continue.

You can learn more by actual using the wordpress engine a few hours, and searching in youtube for certain doubts or hints. This course its not worth the time invested nor the the money.

The only thing that its useful are some of the links with articles about webdesign.

By Ann M S

Apr 10, 2016

This was the most poorly designed course that I have ever encountered. Whoever is in control of quality assurance was caught napping on this one - the instructors were woeful! It was as if the principles of instructional design and adult learning were abandoned entirely; there was minimal instruction and I had to rely on my intuition and the assistance of a study buddy to work hard to complete the course. If you are completely new to website design (as I was), prepare for a steep learning curve as you will be spending many hours preparing and organising your info - the title is deceptive and misleading!

Ann, Melbourne, Australia April 2016.