I've learnt things sort of backwards; I know the S2 system pretty well, from a scary number of years of troubleshooting and helping people with layouts (I was doing LJ Support back when S2 was first introduced, yes I'm that old). Indeed, I was one of the team who ported S2 over to Dreamwidth back in the closed beta days. It's based on this experience that I've offered to mentor, because I can definitely help people with the labyrinth that is the advanced customization system.

However I have really little experience in either programming or web design, so I'm almost a beginner at the same time. I don't know how to generate good concepts for what a journal should look like, and I don't really know enough CSS to implement any ideas I do have. Especially positioning, I really struggle with positioning. I'm pretty good at "porting" other people's layouts, eg from LJ Flexible Squares to DW Tabula Rasa, or from purely CSS based to S2. So as a student, I mainly want to learn to design from scratch.

Goals for the course:

• sort out the archive and tags views of my journal, which are kind of a mess at the moment because of the CSS tweaks I made to my entries and comments views.
  
• implement some kind of collapsed / collapsible / summary reading page system, hopefully robust enough to add to all the system styles
  
• make a start on designing a style which uses some fixed width and absolute dimension elements, ideally without too many compromises on screen-reader accessibility. I know a lot of people hate DW's selection of highly flexible, relative sized, div-based layouts, because they want to use graphics and make something pixel-perfect in any browser or resolution (including weird / proprietary / deprecated ones). I don't know if it's possible to have fixed width and accessibility at the same time, but I'm hoping to learn enough to start to tackle this issue.
  
• build on my skills for helping people who have a really great vision for what their journal should look like, but don't know how to implement it.