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The Marlboro College Graduate Center in Brattleboro, Vermont, just released its Open Source Web Development certificate in a wholly online format.

If you've been working with Joomla, but you want to know a lot more about it, this is the certificate program for you.  The certificate introduces students to Joomla, as well as planning a website, understanding the code that runs it, and developing and executing an online marketing plan.

The certificate consists of 12 credits:

• Human-Computer Interaction: Learn to plan a website, as well as design a good interface! This course covers many aspects of usability, design, and testing of web interfaces.
• Designing With Web Standards: This course teaches standards-compliant XHTML 1.0 Transitional as well as CSS 2.1. Why standards are important, how to approach designing with standards, validation, and debugging are also covered in depth.
• Web Applications: Using Joomla as our foundation, we look at what a web application is and how it works. We'll cover a little PHP and database design, plus we'll look at Joomla custom template design, template overrides, and more, as well as the basics of working with Joomla.
• Marketing 2.0: Now that you've got a great website, you need to get the message to the world -- hopefully on a budget! Learn all about Google Analytics, search engine optimization, Google AdWords and other online advertising, email marketing, and more.

Anyone can download Joomla, click a few buttons, and get a quick little website running -- that's part of its power and charm. But taking your website to the next level, so that you have a truly professional-level product -- that takes much more expertise and planning. This certificate will help you bring value to your clients, take on larger clients, and it can really help you launch your web design and development business.

This certificate is available in two formats. Our hybrid format consists of biweekly class meetings (7 per trimester) plus work in between online.  Now, for the first time at the Marlboro College Graduate School, we are offering this Open Source Web Development certificate in a wholly online format.  We're doing this as a beta, and consequently, we're offering 20% off on tuition. We'll only accept 18 students to our online certificate, so enroll now!

Interested in learning more or want to apply? Get in touch with Joe Heslin, Joomla expert extraordinaire and Director of Graduate Admissions, at (888) 258-5665, x209 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

I'm the program director for this certificate, and I'll be co-teaching the Web Applications class. I'm happy to answer questions as well, so send them to me!