Customer Reviews

Web Page Design: A Different Multimedia

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

 

 

This is not about how to make a site look great so much as how to organize and structure it. I found it very useful and hardly dated at all. - Marcia Yudkin, Author of Internet Marketing for Less than $500/Year and nine other books

There is some really good material here. Unfortunately the first three chapters are incredibly fluffy and vague. They are also full of grammatical mistakes, non sequiturs, and spelling errors. The home page of one fairly pedestrian and old-fashioned site is shown in grayscale half-a-dozen times, wasting 15 column inches. The valuable ideas in the front could have been distilled into 8 pages instead of taking 70.

-Start at Chapter 4. From here out the book is very good. It starts with developing for the audience, navigation principles, color and graphics, etc. and goes all the way to Java, VRML and interactive design. So don't give up. The book design and editing are poor, but the last two-thirds makes it worth the price.

I'm a freelance web designer, i find this book very useful.It teaches you about Web marketing and some hot tips, The structure of the website,rating a website.How to design a perfect webpage.include some case study which is useful. Yet another good book.

A general how-to-do-it book which excellently treats both the most nebulous questions (e.g. "What is the web and what design issues do its characteristics raise?") and specific techniques and issues (e.g., "What meta information techniques are available and which are likely to become part of a standard?").

Based on the reviews, you would think this book is a guide to design theory, laying out what`s good and bad about web design. I thought it might tell me things the "pros" know that I had overlooked and provide real examples I could implement.

Instead I got a book at is so general that it can make any point it wants, is INCREDIBLY dated, considering when it was published, and uses only 3 or 4 examples of websites in the entire book, most conspicuously Sun`s. Maybe that shouldn`t have been surprising since the writer is a former Sun employee. Much of the book comes off as lame PR for the company.

I learned nothing new in this book and I`m no pro. Even worse, much of the writing is couched in such terse, psudo-academic prose that you have no idea what the authors are trying to say. What is clear, though, is that they say it over and over again. Save your mdoney and get, believe it or not, Learn Great Web Design in 21 Days. While I usually stay far away as possible from the "in XX days" books, this one is a beautiful, all-color, large format book that uses dozens and dozens of examples and ofers design tips you may not have tried, like pull quotes, color schemes, etc. Wish I could get a refund.

Mary Morris and Randy Hinrichs go behind the scenes in what makes a web site great. They explain in great detail how to make your site searchable, updatable, user friendly, etc. You should be at the Intermediate level to get the most benefit out of the book. What's been very helpful to me were the chapters on using meta tags, on designing for future updates, and how to design around the limitations of the screen real estate (foreground, background, etc.). If you have a large site, you really need this book. People with smaller sites (like I do) will find the discussion on design to be very valuable. John Dunbar