Customer Reviews

Small Websites, Great Results

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It's easy to lose sight of the basic needs of the user when building a website, but if you're smart enough to read this book and enlist its theories in your plan, you'll end up with a useful, intuitive, and profitable site. The text is direct in its message and is easy for inexperienced web designers to understand. Screen shots clearly illustrate good and bad examples. Thank you, Mr. Addison, for showing us that bigger is not better.

Doug Addison's thesis here is that many, if not most, websites are too cumbersome to fulfill the needs of the average Internet user, and that frustrating your potential customers is no way to get their business. His clear recommendations for improvement are sensible and timely; one doesn't have to look very hard to find examples of "bloated" websites with their aggravating redirects and obscure pathways. Addison has practiced what he preaches in this text: he doesn't muddy the water with redundant prose or needlessly technical jargon, so even a neophyte like myself can easily navigate the often complex world of modern web design. This is required reading for anyone interested in their first website, and it should be required for any experienced web designer who thinks that bigger is always better. Some of the graphics are a little small, but Addison's decision to use real web pages to illustrate the good, the bad, and the ugly of the Internet provides the reader with up-to-date, concrete examples that augment his text rather than simply decorate it. A very useful and enlightening guide.

The plus sides of this book is that it shows people that bigger is not always better, incorporating all the bells and whistles is not always productive in creating an effective web site and finally a web site should be about the users and not the designers or business.

I have a number of years in the web development arena and I have read a LOT of books on the subject. Doug's book is very refreshing for the simple fact that there are not a lot of books of this type of information available today. From the beginning of the book, he gives you clear cut information and examples of his thoughts on web site bloat and how to prevent it. As the book progresses, he then starts showing how to develope the "plan" of creating a lean and mean site and avoiding bloat. Thus improving customer relationships and turning visitors into customers.

My only complaints about the book are the images for the web site examples were a bit small and really relied on you visiting the site to view and compare. What happens if the site updates their site!! :)

It is a great book for people thinking about getting their business a web presence and doing it with the least amount of headache and the max amount of information. Plus seasoned web designers/developers can learn a thing or two as well about keeping sites geared more towards customers and users than themselves etc.

Addison is directing his book to a person, possibly of a nontechnical background, responsible for designing a website. The emphasis here is on a clean, simple design. The book gives a top-down approach. It helps you with the design and deliberately eshews discussing the programming aspects of how to implement it. That is the remit of other books. Put it this way. There is only one explicit mention of HTML tags in the entire book. Leave most of that stuff to the programmers. Instead, Addison spends much attention on showing a good website focus that a reader will quickly understand.

Also, that one instance of an HTML tag refers to the META tag. It does not affect the visible aspect of a page. But you need to craft this to help search engines classify your pages for maximum exposure to queries. Important for any website.

So without knowing HTML, you can still get a practical understanding of what can be designed with it. Hence, the book might appeal to you, if your strength is in graphics design, and not coding.

I like this book. It contains a strong summary of basic website design concepts in chapters 1-5. These are ideas that can be found elsewhere, but this book has them combined in a succinct, easy to comprehend format. For me, the book started to lose it in Chapter 6 where the author goes into a discussion of marketing. I felt that the topics here were very superficially covered, and he had too broad a focus. He tried to cover web marketing from a traditional marketing standpoint, and there are much better books that cover general marketing. He also touched on website placement. His comments were so minimal though, that I didn't feel they gave enough knowledge to the reader to really make a big difference. It would be better to find a good book on search engine optimization and skip that portion of this book.

Chapter 8 presents some good ideas on how to utilize a professional web designer, and chapters 9 and 10 cover site maintenance well. Chapters 11-15 have some good examples.

The other comment I have about the book is that the author seems to artificially apply everything to small sites. Much of the design advice he gives applies to large sites as well, yet he always states that they are small site design concepts.

I'm not a graphic designer nor an artist - I'm just a guy who wants to build a nice-looking family web site. I am, however, a software developer, and as a developer, I find it tempting to do things "just because I can". This book gives me the well-deserved smack upside the head when I get excited about some cool (and usually pointless or gaudy) new CSS or JavaScript effect.

The book first discusses elements that make a small web site great - i.e. simplicity, context, and organization. It then moves on to explaining how to create the proper focus and discusses proper use of color, images and navigation. There are also sections on marketing, selecting a web designer (if you don't want to do-it-yourself), and what to do when you need a "big" web site.

The end of the book is devoted to developing web sites for professional services, trade services, specialty services, artists, writers and performers, and restaurants. These provide plenty of variety and suggestions you can take and apply to your own small web site.

Plenty of common sense and direction. If you are looking for a set of guidelines for creating a quality small web site, this book fits the bill.

Doug Addison provides a real service with this book because he has made it useful not only for people thinking about their first website but also for those of us who already have a website and wonder how to make it better. To think small instead of large...a new way for me to think. To ask myself what is the focus of my website...very useful challenge. To determine how much of what I have do I really want and need...a promising conversation to have with myself. I am now looking at my website in a new way and suspect that the future revision I and my web designer will be doing will contain in some way the basic messages of this excellent book.

I purchased this book after reading the feedback and other information. Overall, it could prove to be helpful as my website matures and business grows, however, as a novice I needed something more hands-on and how-to. The information contained in the book is valuable, but not helpful to me at the moment. I found myself saying "that's great, but how do I do that." Now, if I were planning to pay a website developer, this would surpass my expectations.

There may be no shortage of websites these days but there sure is a shortage of ones that are well designed and easy to navigate. Unfortunately, even most of the large websites are overly crowded, hard to figure out how to do things, and absolutely awful in terms of user friendliness. Author Doug Addison does an excellent job of discussing problems with websites and how to design ones that are user friendly and a joy to use. With an obvious flair for the artistic this book really shows some excellently designed web sites. This book is the answer to the plethora of websites that tend more to be an exercise in frustration than anything else. The focus is on creating a user experience that is positive and encourages the user to visit again. For a truly great website that produces the results you want you have to have the right focus for your website, the right design, and the right navigation format to produce a positive customer experience. Doug Addison not only helps you do this but also includes many tips and techniques for content and functionality that users love and as a result turn your visitors into customers. Personally, I've been to sites where I could not figure out how to complete a purchase so I went to a competitor. You don't want this happening to your website. This is one of the best books on website design I've read and the advice really hits the spot for frustrations and problems I have experienced. Bravo, Doug Addison, now if we could just get those technical people and website designers to read Small Websites, Great Results then we would all be happier.

This book will help anyone at any stage of the website endeavor; it demystefies the process of setting up a effective site, and it offers suggestions for making existing sites more user-friendly. As a professional person in a non-technical field, I found this book to be very helpful in making decisions about how to structure my website. This book convinced me that "less is more" and taught me how to make key design decisions to increase traffic. "Great Results" - indeed!