Customer Reviews

Web Pages That Suck: Learn Good Design by Looking at Bad Design with CDROM

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

What better way to learn & appreciate good site design than by looking at what is faulty/sucks? The writers are opinionated as hell, but that's part of the fun in reading this book. It's slick, comes with a CD-Rom and offers useful stuff for your own site. But if you're looking for something less "humorous", the better choice would be Desiging Web Usability, by Jakob Nielson.

This book is simply a waste of your money. I bought this based off of the other reviews on amazon.com. This book just gets too repetitive. All this book tells you is to keep the size of your web pages down.

MAYBE this book might be a useful resource for a person who is also purchasing an HTML book and if they have NO experience whatsover. Even if you have made 2 pages you already know everything in this book.

This book does one thing that is annoying: It blabs and blabs about all the boring unimportant stuff, and when it comes to something important like choosing colors combinationg, it gives you a link to some site and says "this is a good resource". If it is so good, why isn't it in the book????

Sure it shows you what is wrong on some pages, but most of it is common sense. What I believed this book would have is how to layout your page, what kind of colors and graphics to use and such to make your page look professional. This book doesnt do any of that. A lot of the book's content is on their website.

If you have any sense go for a different book. If there is a book out there called "BOOKS THAT SUCK", boy does this book belong in there. This is definetaly a huge dissapointment. Instead of reading this, go out and look at other websites and practice making em. You will land out far ahead.

The only instance in which this book might be OK is if you are completely new to web page design. If you have any experience this book wont help you make professional loooking pages. Look elsewhere for that.

Pompous, self-important, arrogant, and full of fluff and smarm. And all that would be okay if it really presented important information in an effective manner.

Good design? Let's talk about good design. On the FIRST PAGE of the text, not three paragraphs into it, these guys ably demonstrate that they don't know a damn thing about design. This is a book that loooooves sidebars--sidebars with illustrations, sidebars with often poor typography, and set off in the most garish and clashing colors they can find. The first chapter opens with a sidebar--different colors, different font, different spacing from the rest of the text. Heading: "IN THIS CHAPTER." We're clearly being set up to read a three-paragraph summary of the high points of the chapter. The the sidebar ends: "the person in marketing who does" -- mid-sentence. Whuh? No "continued" blue sidebar on the facing page. No "continued" blue sidebar on the next page. Then you realize: that sidebar wasn't a sidebar at all--the sentence continues in the NEXT column, black-on-white text in a different font. It's appalling--these yahoos are presuming to lecture on "good design" and they can't get half a page into their first chapter without crashing.

Illustrations are sometimes jammed into the text at more or less appropriate points, sometimes set off in more infamous sidebars, color-coded like the last example to tell the reader that they're not part of the main text (although they are), and sometimes hanging half-on, half-off a colored border for no evident reason at all.

The text lurches madly from color to color, font to font, layout style to layout style, with no rhyme, reason or underlying logic (this is especially ironic when they're talking about site design and layout, and the need for consistency). There are even grammatical flubs.

And, again, that would be OK if the text itself were well-written, well-organized, and packed with useful information. Sadly, none of this is really true. The text is flabby, rambling, poorly put together, and full mostly of "I like this," or "This sucks," and more smug narcissism than is to be found at the Academy Awards. There are good pointers here--if you dig for them, if you fight your way through to them--but isn't the point of good design supposed to be that you don't have to dig or fight to get to the good stuff?

...And even that might be okay, if the fluffy, cutesy stuff were actually entertaining. Listen: "If there are two people who aren't boring, it's me...and my co-author...If you're one of the millions of visitors to the original Web Pages That Suck.com site, you'll know that humor played an important part in its success. [It] is about education and entertainment, or, as we call it, 'edutainment.' People learn best when they're enjoying the process, and humor is a great tool toward this end. We're using humor in this book for the same reason." No matter how cool this guy thinks he is, I'll wager that no one who ever wrote such a manifesto on being funny has the faintest grasp of what humor is or how to apply it.

Anything this book wants to do has been done elsewhere, and much better (and without two overweight web designers appearing in Elvis suits open to the navel). Save your money.

Of the 3 or 4 web page design books that I've purchased this one is the best by far. Be examining the common mistakes people make when putting together a web site the authors illustrate good web page design principles. They use examples from actual commercial sites on the web, telling you what's wrong with them and what they did right. The writing style is light and the book is full of humor (what did you expect with a title like that). However, don't let this fool you into thinking that the book doesn't have any "meat" in it. While the authors are designers by background, they also seem to know a lot of the technical aspects about the web. They cover the latest technologies (as of 1998) and tell you how to use them. More importantly, they tell you when not to use them.

These guys definitely feel that it's best to avoid "bleeding edge" techniques. They are also advocate the principle of keeping things simple. Many the sites that they think "suck" are one with an overuse of animation, strange colors, or flashy techniques. They also point out sites that may look good on one browser at one resolution but may look terrible when viewed on another -- then they show you how to avoid this problem.

It appears as though their target audience is someone that is designing a site for commercial purposes. This book was not specifically intended for the person putting together a family web page. That being said, I think that anyone that's designing for the web will learn a great deal by reading this book.

My only criticism for this book is that it probably needs to be updated. It is currently a couple of years old and some technologies have change since it was written.

This book is 3 years old, on the Internet this is decades. I enjoy reading it, but I didn't learned much. The authors seems to concern themselves more with the aesthetics of web design than with the usability. Borrow it from your local library , there are better books to buy on the subject.

I bought this book for one reason: there is a double-page spread concerning Pepsi.com (pages 32-33). It made me laugh, because I was the webmaster for Pepsi.com when this book came out. They were viewing the site out of the context of the frame it was supposed to be in (they purposely launched a new browser window from within the fixed-sized frame and maximized the window to show a tiling background), which was misleading and a bit inflamatory to those of us who slave over a site that at the time was around 650MB per issue and changed top to bottom every single month.

The screenshot they got of the site was also of a help screen that was up for about 1 week and then altered. The entire site is done in Flash, now, and a lot of the cross-browser, cross-platform issues that were such a barrier in the past are now a moot point.

They point out some valid points about contrast, abuse of animation, but this is a book best suited for beginning designers, not seasoned pros.

They haven't come out with a newer volume and despite the description of this book (I am submitting a revision today) as being a 1998 book, the copyright of the book I have (same ISBN number) is 1996. That's 28 in dog years and a millenium in web years. While good design is still good design, despite the year, even casual surfers who've been surfing for a few months will find some of this info old-hat.

I must admit that it's a little unfair to criticize a technical book 4 years after it hit the shelves, but my main criticisms are the same as when I first purchased the book a few years ago. Even then, there were many free on-line tutorials that covered the same topic of basic design and definite design faux pas.

I do keep this on my shelf in my office, the book is a nicely presented volume and clients find it quite amusing... but other than that... eck.

This book is suitable for someone new to web design. I know I made the mistake of throwing together my first personal page the minute I learned what the <html> tag is for (shudder). This book presents a funny look at how *not* to design a web site, by using bad examples. Their web site is also informative, as they review sites on a regular basis.

As someone who spends a great deal of time browsing for suitable course books I look for content with readability, simplicity, clarity, and relevance. I'm currently in the business of raising the IT awareness of non-IT people so a lot of mainstream IT textbooks are unappealingly dense. It was refreshing to find something that didn't lose sight of basic ideas among the available plethora of fancy technological structures.

This is not necessarily a book for arty or techy designers. They would almost certainly find it too simplistic. On the other hand a business person who is commissioning a website or someone who is quite new to it all (yes, there are plenty of them out there!) could well use it to remind them not to be thoroughly seduced by available technology; designers and programmers naturally want to show off their skills and experiment and might thus lose sight of what their customer wants. I'd recommend this as a basic design guide to someone who needs to commission a website and doesn't have much time to delve into the details.

Whether the technology is out of date or not is irrelevant as IT books, like almost all technology, are likely to be out of date soon after you buy them. The book provides a route to ideas checklists and a set of pointers which are accessible to anyone. Certainly it's repetitive and a little short on content for the price but people who buy it may not be reading it page for page so this would have the effect of ensuring that they don't miss important points. Whether the authors intended this effect is another question.

Whether it's funny or not really depends on your appreciation of the look and feel of early 70s hippy geekdom. The ha ha in-your-face humour may be unpalatable to busy thrusting 21st century thrusting entrepreneurials. I'm a sort of affiliate geek so I found it tolerable. And of course I made a few allowances. They are Americans, after all.

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If you dare say your interested in website design, then I must beg of you why you do not have this book already? As a professional web designer I was totally impressed with this book. It holds true to every concept on decent and good web design that I have been trying to teach my employees and students forever.

The concepts are simple, and presented in a humorous and fun tone. The graphics are colourful and definitely add to advice being given. I think this book is a must have for hobbyist and pro, beginner and expert alike. There is just too much valuable information in here, even if it serves as a check list to judge your own work against, it is well worth it for anyone at any level. At the very least, it's a good place to start a fresh designers training.

My only complaint is the age of the book, the urls and websites could be updated, as well as the wonderful cd included in the back, that being said, I still hold firm this book is worth more then every penny.

Anyone who works in this industry will tell you that good design is about bringing in money, something you can't do if you scare away your users. This book teaches you about advertising art. Read it, learn it, live it.

Learn what to do right, by learning what not to do wrong. What an awesome idea, why didn't I think of that?

I really enjoyed this book! The authors approach website design from a humourous angle. The book is full of practical information for those who have not yet created a website or for those who want to learn more about making and marketing a better site. This book is for both technical and non-technical readers. You definitely have to read this book if you are involved in any way with website design. However, I found that the book was quite repetitive. Various topics and anecdotes were repeated verbatim in several chapters. Also, if you have ever visited Vincent Flanders' website of the same name, you will be able to download much of the content of the book for free. His website contains numerous articles which are basically repeated in the book and a free chapter from the book. Finally, some of the sections of the book (such as creating a storyboard for site design) were quite skinny. I think the authors could have included a lot more information here to help guide a beginner through the design phase which they claim is the most critical to success of a website. Otherwise, a completely enjoyable book and I would buy it again without regrets.