Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates (Internet Series) (Charles River Media Internet) [Paperback]

Clint Eccher (Author), Eric Hunley (Author), Erik Simmons (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 16, 2004 | ISBN-10: 1584503653 | ISBN-13: 978-1584503651 | Edition: 2

Whether you are an intermediate Web designer looking to take your sites to the next level or a more experienced designer looking to improve your professional skills, you will find the tools to meet your needs in Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates, Second Edition. This completely updated version of the best-selling book features the 50 professional-quality, license-free Web design templates from the original, as well as 15 new templates, all of which can be easily customized and extended. Each ready-to-use design includes a homepage, and one second-level page, and the framework to build subsequent pages. All of the specific techniques that are required for building these and other highly usable sites have been updated to cover the latest technologies, including HTML, XHTML, JavaScript, CSS, Photoshop CS, and PHP. Also included are five new HTML e-mail templates, an increasingly important marketing tool. Detailed tutorials and hands-on projects teach both basic and sophisticated design concepts, including how to create designs for low, medium, or high content sites and the strengths and weaknesses of each. The new edition also includes four new chapters on Cascading Style Sheets, using client-side scripting, creating dynamic sites, and an overview of the new Web designs. It covers important topics such as client- and server-side scripting, security, and using databases to update a site,s content.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Clint Eccher has designed professional Web sites for seven years and now makes some of his designs available as templates through his own site (A5design.com) and with his new book, Professional Web Design. You get 50 templates (each of which features home and second-level pages) and careful instructions on how to adapt them for your own use. Along the way, Eccher offers sound advice on good Web design practices; a little bit about HTML, cascading style sheets, and JavaScript; a look at JPEGs and GIFs; and some insight into "comping" (sketching) a site design for the client's approval.

For the most part, however, this book addresses just those aspects of Web design that readers will need to know in order to successfully utilize the templates. These are designed as "mortised" sites; that is, they are built with nested tables and sliced GIF/JPEG combinations, the kind of design made easy with the advent of Adobe's ImageReady and Macromedia's Fireworks. Although this is not a how-to about using those applications or about creating such sites from scratch, Eccher does help readers learn how to debug and otherwise adjust the source code in order to successfully implement the designs. In addition to trial versions of the major applications, the CD-ROM also contains the JavaScript Cookbook and HTML/CSS Developer's Resource Guide, which provide lots of cut-and-paste source code for all kinds of features (games, sounds, pop-up messages) that can be added to a Web page.

One caveat: despite the templates, this book is too detailed for beginners. For those with some experience, and especially for developers who lack design skills and like the A5design style, this book amounts to an intensive Clint Eccher brain-picking seminar. He offers a few tricks that can be applied to any design (like his tips on how to drastically reduce file sizes) and some good general advice (for example, "Do not get attached to the work" because a client may just decide against it). --Angelynn Grant --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Clint Eccher (Fort Collins, CO) is an award winning Web designer with more than 15 years of experience designing and developing professional Web sites. He is the owner of A5design, a Web design company that not only subcontracts to various marketing, advertising, and IT organizations, but also is commissioned by Fortune 500 companies, non-profit organizations, and small businesses for Web design and development. In addition to authoring the previous editions of Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates, which have been published in five different languages, he is also the author of Advanced Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates.

Eric Hunley (Hampton, VA) is an instructor and Web Developer.He has taught and developed numerous courses including 25 different courses at the University of Arizona Extended University, including many on Macromedia and Web design. He is is the author of Web Design with Macromedia Studio MX 2004 and co-author of Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates, Second Edition.

Erik Simmons (Oro Valley, AZ) is an independent designer and illustrator, and is the principal of the online creative studios Vividology.com and FullAfterburner.com. He has won multiple awards for his design work and has served clients such as Hewlett-Packard, UTI, the U.S. Government, as well as several national non-profit organizations.

Product Details

• Paperback: 586 pages
• Publisher: Charles River Media; 2 edition (November 16, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584503653
• ISBN-13: 978-1584503651
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #808,886 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent for design concepts., November 13, 2002

By 

Michael J Woznicki "Michael J Woznicki" (Holland, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates (with CD-ROM) (Charles River Media Internet & Web Design) (Paperback)

In the classroom, when I teach web design, unless the courseware comes with templates the students spend the time creating pages from scratch. While this is worthwhile for novices, there are times when you need templates for some web projects.

In this book the authors has given you over 200 HTML templates, which are on the cd-rom, to work with. By following along with the book you'll end up creating over 50 pages. You find yourself working with frames, forms, tables, graphics and CSS.

The book should have had the design outputs in color to allow you to be able to see what the outcome would like. I did like the 3 case studies included, which take you from a basic web page to a very advanced design layout.

The cd-rom included trial version of Photoshop, FireWorks, Flash and HomeSite all of which have newer versions out and should be updated for the next edition. I found the JavaScript Cook to be a very handy and useful tool for creating scripts without an in depth knowledge of the coding techniques.

The other handy utility included in the HTML/CSS Developer's resource guide, which makes the creation of CSS easier. With all the helpful tool and tricks the book is certainly a welcome addition to my HTML/Web Design library. Overall a very good value for the money.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good Introduction to Mortised Site Design, January 18, 2005

By 

John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates (Internet Series) (Charles River Media Internet) (Paperback)

As the title says, this is a book on the design of web pages. It is focused on producing designs that reflect many of the modern trends in web design thought. There was a time a few years back when the web sites of all the major companies used Macromedia Flash to animate, that is create movement, on their home pages. For instance, the authors report, quite accurately I think, that such animation has not proven suitable for the majority of web sites. Like Microsoft's "clippy" paper clip "help" thing that used to appear at the bottom of Word/Esce./Etc. a lot of people really don't like moving things.

These authors really like mortised sites. This design philosophy uses tables within tables within tables to provide the view the authors are trying to create. The designs they give in their fifty included templates are of the mortised type. The trouble with mortised sites is that you have to receive all of the information for the site before the browser can begin drawing the tables on the screen. With todays fast processors, this is not usually a problem. But they can get dreadfully slow if you are accessing them over a slow line, especially if they include a lot of graphical images.

The back of the book says this is for Beginner to Intermediate. This does not mean the Front Page level beginner. You'd best have some idea about HTML before you start this one. I'd say it's an intermediate level book, which is reflected in the wording on the back page.

25 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Visually stunning but..., April 24, 2004

By 

TheCafeWriter (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates (with CD-ROM) (Charles River Media Internet & Web Design) (Paperback)

All the designs are heavily mortised, require a LOT of nested tables, and are mainly geared toward content-heavy sites with extensive menus. (For those of us who think that paying hundreds of dollars of Photoshop is ridiculous when Paint Shop Pro does the same for 1/6 the cost, be warned the templates are Photoshop-centric.)

As someone already said, these are visually stunning examples, but very tables-intensive which can be time-consuming to edit/code and may be problematic for impaired site visitors who rely on web-reading technology. For the dozen or so examples (and their variations), decide for yourself if inspiration is worth the cost.