The Web Page Design Cookbook: All the Ingredients You Need to Create 5-Star Web Pages

Author: William Horton, Lee Taylor, Arthur Ignacio, Nancy L. Hoft List Price: $49.99 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0471130397 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (November, 1995) Edition: Paperback Sales Rank: 54,245 Average Customer Rating: 3.55 out of 5

Buy now directly from Amazon.com -

Customer Reviews

What it does have, and what keeps me from discarding it in favour of newer and more comprehensive HTML and page-design guides is its sensible advice on web site design. It's one of the few books with "web" and "design" in the title which actually covers web site design issues! It urges readers to think in terms of simple sites with useful content, and consider how the information might be used by people from all over the world as well as the usual issues of download speed and browser compatibility. If you follow its advice you might actually get a few more customers from outside the USA.

Probably not worth buying these days, but borrow it from a friend or check it out of the library if you do see it

For a total beginner this is a good first book because it steps you through creating your first page, then adding features and using advanced HTML as you progress. For someone who is already proficient with HTML and has developed a few pages, you may find something useful in the advanced techniques and will certainly receive an education in good web page design. Some of the highlights of the authors' approach to design are in the examples. The accompanying CD ROM has every example in HTML format so you can see how they will display in your particular browser brand and version, and you can look at the code and play with it to see how your changes will display. This alone is a real time saver, and it makes this book all the more useful.

If you are a technical writer the examples for web pages that provide how-to procedures, troubleshooting procedures, on-line lessons and survey forms reflect good page design and the example files on the CD ROM can be immediately used as templates.

The only thing that detracts from this book is that it's woefully out of date. Some of the tools provided on the CD ROM are ancient, as are the discussions on various desktop operating systems. For example, Windows 95 was not even on the market when this book went to press and the authors' discussion on network issues were educated guesses. Now the network facilities built into desktop operating systems are so transparent that this section of the book can be safely ignored. However, we also live in a world where HTML has evolved to version 4, cascading style sheets are used on many sites (not to mention Macromedia Flash, Active Server Pages, more sophisticated java and javascript, etc.), rendering a lot of the technical aspects of this book quaint. On the other hand, that might not be such a bad thing since the best web pages are simple and more focused on design instead of a bunch of technical razzle-dazzle. But, I would love to see this book updated to reflect contemporary tools and techniques for web page design because I like the way the authors' impart their knowledge. This book would make an excellent text for a web design 101 class, and is one of the best for those of us who play around with this stuff. I'm subtracting a star because the book sorely needs to be updated, but am still giving it my highest recommendation.

Similar Products