Customer Reviews

Web Design Before & After Makeovers (Before & After Makeovers)

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

 

 

The title of this book is little misleading. I was expecting to see examples of boring web page designs transformed into exciting, clean new page designs. But instead, I saw boring web pages transformed into still-boring but better-working pages.

Many of the makeovers are geared toward the underlying HTML of a page. By applying small doses of CSS and javascript, the page's structure or usability can be significantly improved. And it's in this context that the book provides most of its valuable material.

On the other hand, the tips for design-oriented changes are fairly rudimentary, relying on Photoshop to create buttons, resize images, generate text graphics, etc. But even worse, some of the makeovers retained the horrendous design gaffes of the original pages -- such as white type against a black background (a surefire way to induce an eyestrain headache). So, take the design tips with a grain of salt.

I should also note that the book focuses on the use of Macromedia Dreamweaver and Photoshop as the preferred production tools. While the book notes that other equivalent programs can be used to implement the makeovers, I always find this claim to be a bit of a cheat, because it forces the author to ignore specific power features of the preferred programs in order to satisfy a more general audience.

There are other books that deal more satisfactorily with each of the separate areas this book purports to cover. For instance, "The Zen of CSS Design" is a good resource for exploring the aesthetic aspects of web design. And O'Reilly's "CSS Cookbook" and "Javascript and DHTML Cookbook" provide solution-specific code for web applications.

Of course, those three books I mentioned will set you back more than this one book. And if you're not a full-time web developer, you might not need the depth of information in those separate books. If that's the case with you, then this book will probably serve your needs just fine.

I'm always on the lookout for books that can help me improve my lackluster interface design skills when it comes to web development. I found a lot to like in the book Web Design Before And After Makeovers by Richard Wagner.

Contents:
Makeover Essentials; Page Layout Makeovers; Navigation Makeovers; Page Element Makeovers, Text Makeovers, Image Makeovers; Image Performance Makeovers; Home Page Makeovers; Content Makeovers; Form Makeovers; Add-On Makeovers; Site Makeovers; Extreme Makeovers; Index

The focus of this book is to take ordinary pages and redo them using standard CSS and JavaScript techniques that add the polish to make the site look more professional. Some of this is more "under the covers", such as using CSS and div tags instead of tables to lay out your form. But tricks on how to round the corners of your boxes, changing the default look and feel of forms, and more professional spacing and layout are definitely more visible and obvious. The tool of choice for his coding is Dreamweaver and Photoshop for image manipulation. But in most cases, you can pretty easily figure out how to do the same thing in your own toolset (if it differs from him). You shouldn't expect a lot of "how to" on the CSS end. He shows you the CSS that he uses to do the coding, but this is *not* a tutorial on the subject. If you didn't know any CSS, you might struggle a bit. For me, the book was worth it for a Firefox developer tool tip that shows the div layouts of your page. I have a coding project coming up, and I think that will be the tool that saves my hide...

If your page design skills haven't progressed much past 1998, you would do well to spend some time here. Most of the information is not overly complex, and it can make a world of difference in your sites.

I bought this book online and didn't realize how utterly unreadable the examples are. I literally have been using a strong magnifying glass to read the code examples (hard to do and type, too). The files are not absolutely consistent with the book either, which can make it difficult in spots to follow along. Sorry, but I also now agree with others that the "makeovers" aren't so amazing. I'll keep it as a reference for a couple of "how-to" topics.

I just came from Borders after having flipped through this book and I absolutely agree with a previous reviewer who said the author doesn't provide much, if any, detailed descriptions. For example, he will tell you that fonts are important to web design. But does not goes into code details about size, spacing, color, etc, other than showing that tweaking them can make a difference in the overall look of a webpage. Hence, the "before/after" approach.

Well, duh! Tweaking anything will make a difference but as a reader I want to know not only what to tweak, but how (and how much) to tweak it. It's the "how much" part he often leaves out. When he touched upon a topic of interest I often needed to look through other books to get more information on how to implement it.

This is definitely not a how-to book. Echoing the other reviewer, this book is for inspiration and is targeted to fairly novice users who might not realize that spacing between paragraphs is a good thing. Having had my own blog for two years, I am pretty familiar with the basics and have tweaked them at one time or another. I need a book that will tell me in detail HOW to do things I wouldn't ordinarily think off doing.

Not to knock this book too much. It did point out a few things I could have designed better so I do think it is useful to gather some design ideas.

I had high hopes for this book until I started trying to work through the ideas/examples. I was disappointed. For one, the book's illustrations of code examples are so small as to be illegible without a magnifying glass, and even with one the illustration highlights obscure some of the code. For two, having downloaded and unzipped the companion files I found these were often redundant, unnecessary, and/or didn't represent what showed up in the book illustrations. It seemed like the author dumped the kitchen sink from his files into the zipped groups. And for three, too often the background/explanation of why to use this or that code snippet was missing. For instance, essential background information about how to size layouts with CSS was woefully absent. I tried to follow the example in the text on a website I was working on, and failed miserably. Nonetheless, the book did stimulate my thinking, and sometimes provided useful information, about how one might make improvements to a website.

I am only 10 + 1 years old and I managed to create my own site with cool frames CSS and everything from scratch. Great for kids, as it is easy to read and understand, unlike some cheesy guides I've come across. Great price, too!

I am a novice, and a kid. I have my own site, where I parody things and found this book a great tool to give my site a total makeover. This is a must for those web-obsessed kids like me!

If you are going to do makeovers, the ending result should be remarkably better.

This book doesn't do that. At all.

From ugly cover to ugly makeovers, this book makes me question print media as a viable option for books related to web design.