- Walks readers through the process of creating a basic Web site from scratch using HMTL, the basis for billions of Web pages, and then jazzing it up with advanced techniques from the author's award-winning sites
- This updated edition features new material that shows readers how to attract visitors to a site and keep them there, including new JavaScript examples and coverage of cascading style sheets and XHTML, technologies that make building successful Web sites even easier
- Also features exciting new tips and tricks for beginning and advanced users, as well as more expanded examples and samples for users to incorporate in their own sites
- The book moves from basic design and deployment to advanced page layout strategies, showing how to spice up new or existing sites with sound, video, and animation
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“…difficult to fault the quality of information provided…” (PC Utilities, August 2004)
From the Back Cover
How to take command of the wide, wonderful Web
Thinking of launching a Web site or an e-business? Want to jazz up the site you already have? This book is jammed with secrets that entice Web wanderers to stop at your site and return again. You’ll find out how to create a basic Web page, enhance it using CSS and JavaScript™, morph it into a complete multipage site, add forms, video, and animation, and get a top ranking from leading search engines. Here’s the perfect mix of technology and creativity–the cool stuff you want to do, plus a thorough understanding of the tools that let you do it.
- Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to maintain consistent formatting for a slick, professional look
- Improve the quality of your site with XHTML, the next generation of markup language
- Jazz up your site with appropriate use of color, graphics, animation, and sound
- Discover how to improve your site design to make it more user friendly
- Write your pages to make them search engine friendly and improve your ranking automatically
- Check out all the examples and much more at the author's Web site: www.intuitive.com/coolsites/
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More About the Author
Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is widely recognized as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. In addition to being a busy writer and blogger, Dave is also a top-rated speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
34 of 34 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Target Audience
Beginning web designers or web designers who want to grow beyond single page designs.
Beginning web designers or web designers who want to grow beyond single page designs.
Contents
This is a reference/tutorial guide to web technologies that are necessary to build web sites. The book is divided into three parts:
Part 1 - Building A Wicked Cool Web Page - So What's All This Web Jazz?; Building Your First Web Page: HTML Basics; Presenting Text Attractively; Moving Into The 21st Century With Cascading Style Sheets; Lists And Special Characters; Putting The Web In World Wide Web: Adding Pointers And Links; From Dull To Cool By Adding Graphics
Part 2 - Rockin' Page Design Strategies - Tables And Frames; Forms, User Input, and the Common Gateway Interface; Advanced Form Design; Activating Your Pages With JavaScript; Advanced Cascading Style Sheets; Site Development With Weblogs
Part 3 - Expanding Your Pages Into A Web Site - Web Sites versus Web Pages; Thinking About Your Visitors And Your Site's Usability; Validating Your Pages And Style Sheets; Building Traffic And Being Found; Closing Thoughts; Appendix A: Step-by-step Web Site Planning Guide; Appendix B: Finding A Home For Your Web Site; Index
Review
If you're just starting out with learning how to build Web pages or sites, you no doubt have a wide number of books to choose from to help you learn those skills. But you can easily get bogged down in the minutiae of every little HTML tag and still not know what CSS means. You need a readable book that gives you solid coverage of essential information. With that in mind, you should check out Creating Cool Web Sites With HTML, XHTML, and CSS by Dave Taylor.
To position this properly, let's make sure you're the right audience. This isn't a book that will teach new tricks to an experienced web designer who earns their living developing corporate web sites. This book does an excellent job in covering a lot of ground without needing 1000+ pages to do so. Taylor takes you through the basics of HTML and XHTML, as well as how to use CSS to add formatting and presentation to your page. There's even some coverage of JavaScript as well. As you continue to gain expertise in each of these areas, you will probably want a hard-core reference manual to continue your education, but Creating Cool Web Sites will give you the necessary foundation to get started.
While targeted more towards beginners, the information in part 3 is a worthy read for a larger audience. To properly build a web site, you have to think of it as a cohesive whole, not just a collection of separate pages. The author helps the reader think through site issues, such as traffic, accessibility, and so on. Once again, any one of these topics could be a book on its own, but this is a nice level of coverage for initial exposure and to get started.
Conclusion
Beginners will find this to be an approachable coverage of web technologies, while intermediate designers will probably gravitate to the Web site design and CSS information.
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
It's not about learning keys strokes, or commands with HTML. It's about learning the syntax of the language. It's about having an idea about what you want your site to convey, and how you want it to look and expressing it through HTML. So a book that teaches HTML must acts as language primer and select a subset of the language to introduce.
This is exactly what this book does. It doesn't provide in-depth coverage of every detail of every tag. It provides an overall look at HTML, then page design, then site design. As such, this is a good book to take you from zero to beginner with HTML. To advance beyond there you will want a book like O'Reilly's "HTML: The Definitive Guide", or moving beyond that O'Reilly's massive "Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference".
I recommend this book for absolute beginners who know nothing about the web and who want to build sites. There is enough there to get you up the ramp of basic knowledge and to get you pointed in the right direction. Sure there are problems, some of the topics (Java, XSLT) could be stripped altogether, but in generally it's a consistently high quality book that covers the three fundamentals; HTML, Page Design and Site Design.
This is exactly what this book does. It doesn't provide in-depth coverage of every detail of every tag. It provides an overall look at HTML, then page design, then site design. As such, this is a good book to take you from zero to beginner with HTML. To advance beyond there you will want a book like O'Reilly's "HTML: The Definitive Guide", or moving beyond that O'Reilly's massive "Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference".
I recommend this book for absolute beginners who know nothing about the web and who want to build sites. There is enough there to get you up the ramp of basic knowledge and to get you pointed in the right direction. Sure there are problems, some of the topics (Java, XSLT) could be stripped altogether, but in generally it's a consistently high quality book that covers the three fundamentals; HTML, Page Design and Site Design.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you want a Web site with more than the cookie-cutter templates offered by Front Page, read this book! It takes the intimidation out of those weird looking HTML, CSS, and Javascript commands, and gives you the tools to bring your Web sites into the 21st century.
Dave gives us the benefit of his experience with a wide variety of browsers on Microsoft, Macintosh, and Unix/Linux platforms, which can help you bring your Web site to the widest possible audience.
This book reminds me of the old game creation books, which build your skills step by step. By the end, I got the same feeling of joy that I got after coding my first version of Space Invaders.
It starts with instructions on how to create simple Web pages. By the time you're done, you'll know how to create the Web pages that work best for you.
When you read this book, follow along with a text editor and the browser(s) of your choice. Dave builds your skills, step by step. You'll be pleasantly surprised by the Web pages that you create.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
lots of info
there is a lot of info in the book, i have only read about 1/3 but lots of good useful info, probably not a book for advanced users, mostly to get a good start on web design.
Published 5 days ago by Terry F
Recommended for a class I'm taking ...
This book was (1) of (3) books recommended by the teacher of my online CSS & XHTML class.
It's more like a workbook than a manual, so it helps to work chapter by... Read more
It's more like a workbook than a manual, so it helps to work chapter by... Read more
Published on October 1, 2007 by kre8iv1
Beginner, but not "cool"...
I got this to be an aid in teaching HTML and CSS to a 13-yr-old.
There is a lot of your standard HTML stuff in here and even some decent CSS basics, but as for being a... Read more
There is a lot of your standard HTML stuff in here and even some decent CSS basics, but as for being a... Read more
Published on January 9, 2007 by Lee Coursey
Best CSS primer also covers CGI and Javascript
Among nearly two shelves of CSS books at the store, this was the best one in terms of brevity, usefulness, and practicality. (With honorable mention to "Eric Meyer on CSS. Read more
Published on January 7, 2007 by John
This book is an antique.
I'm glad I didn't open the enclosed CD. I'd then be selling this book. I understand the basics of HTML coding haven't changed, but when I read the forward of this book, I knew it... Read more
Published on December 20, 2006 by Gerald P. Ustaitis
I am not a techie . . .
And I don't even play one on TV. But I sometimes find myself having to do techie things, such as making revisions to my Web site, or trying to figure out why the $%@! Read more
Published on June 15, 2006 by Cathy Stucker
Excellent Resource to get Your Web Site Up and Running
This is one of the best organized, well-written technical books I have encountered in the last 15 years! Read more
Published on March 26, 2006 by liz quilts
Good but perhaps too extensive
The didactic work is perfect the author is really expert in the subject and the expression is very didactic the examples are very well selected. Read more
Published on February 22, 2006 by Jose Jorge Guim Balcells
Learn From a Gifted Teacher
Learn Web site design the easy way, from a gifted teacher! Dave Taylor is one of those rare authors that is truly gifted at teaching his subject. Read more
Published on July 27, 2005 by J. Madsen
An excellent book..
This book is great for teaching you how HTML really works. He provides a lot of good examples and makes some fairly difficult concepts easy-to-understand. Read more
Published on December 20, 2004 by Liannis
Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
This chapter covers the basics of the Web, showing how information pointers help you organize information and illustrating how Web browsers can simplify file transfer, searches, and other Internet services. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Internet Explorer, World Wide Web, White House, Dave's Desk, Winter Wrens, Barrow's Goldeneyes, Internet Figure, Sherlock Holmes, Yellow-Bellied Sapsuckers, Sam Spiegel, Cool Web Movie Database, David Lean, Headline News, Paint Shop Pro, Black Haw, Blood Pressure, The Intuitive Life, Common Cable, Cyberspace Dear Reader, Times Roman, French Quarter, Lawrence of Arabia, Level One Header, Microsoft Windows, Moby Dick New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
This chapter covers the basics of the Web, showing how information pointers help you organize information and illustrating how Web browsers can simplify file transfer, searches, and other Internet services. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Internet Explorer, World Wide Web, White House, Dave's Desk, Winter Wrens, Barrow's Goldeneyes, Internet Figure, Sherlock Holmes, Yellow-Bellied Sapsuckers, Sam Spiegel, Cool Web Movie Database, David Lean, Headline News, Paint Shop Pro, Black Haw, Blood Pressure, The Intuitive Life, Common Cable, Cyberspace Dear Reader, Times Roman, French Quarter, Lawrence of Arabia, Level One Header, Microsoft Windows, Moby Dick New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 10
books:
See all 10 books this book cites
- Doctor Zhivago (Spanish Edition) by David Lean on 5 pages
- Moby Dick (Bibliotheque Des Grands Classiques)(Illustrated) (French Edition) by Melville on page 45, and page 46
- Wicked Cool Shell Scripts by Dave Taylor in Front Matter, and page 297
- Moby Dick (Usborne Classics) by H Melville on page 45, and page 46
- Moby Dick (French Edition) by Herman Melville on page 45, and page 46
See all 10 books this book cites
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