Product Description

Whether you are a beginning Web designer trying to improve your professional skills or a more experienced designer looking to take your sites to the next level, you will find the tools you need in Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates. Through hands-on projects, examples, and case studies, this book teaches both basic and sophisticated design concepts for creating professional Web sites. The established areas of usability and multimedia are described in detail, and the best features of each are incorporated into the new approach of “mortising.” This approach “mortises” nested tables and compressed images to create sites that are as attractive as they are effective. To illustrate these concepts, the book and CD-ROM also feature 50 professional quality, license-free Web design templates that can be quickly and easily customized. Each ready-to-use design includes a homepage, at least one second-level page, and the framework to build subsequent pages.

KEY FEATURES

* Covers the entire design process, from gathering requirements and creating a comp, to enhancing usability, designing for scalability, developing architecture, and simplifying navigation

* Provides detailed case studies that show how to create designs for low, medium, or high content sites and teach the strengths and weaknesses of each

* Explains technical issues, from hardware and software requirements, bandwidth, HTML, and CSS, to when to use GIF or JPEG images

* Teaches you how to upload your site to a server and test for compatibility with current versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape

* Includes 50 professional quality, ready-to-use, license-free Web design templates that can be easily customized

* Covers three main areas of Web design: usability, multimedia, and the new area of “mortising”

* Provides hands-on projects and case studies for creating a variety of sites

* CD-ROM includes source files for each of the templates, two FREE software packages, and demo versions of third party software

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1025554 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 429 pages

From Amazon.com
Clint Eccher has designed professional Web sites for seven years and now makes some of his designs available as templates through his own site (A5design.com) and with his new book, Professional Web Design. You get 50 templates (each of which features home and second-level pages) and careful instructions on how to adapt them for your own use. Along the way, Eccher offers sound advice on good Web design practices; a little bit about HTML, cascading style sheets, and JavaScript; a look at JPEGs and GIFs; and some insight into "comping" (sketching) a site design for the client's approval.

For the most part, however, this book addresses just those aspects of Web design that readers will need to know in order to successfully utilize the templates. These are designed as "mortised" sites; that is, they are built with nested tables and sliced GIF/JPEG combinations, the kind of design made easy with the advent of Adobe's ImageReady and Macromedia's Fireworks. Although this is not a how-to about using those applications or about creating such sites from scratch, Eccher does help readers learn how to debug and otherwise adjust the source code in order to successfully implement the designs. In addition to trial versions of the major applications, the CD-ROM also contains the JavaScript Cookbook and HTML/CSS Developer's Resource Guide, which provide lots of cut-and-paste source code for all kinds of features (games, sounds, pop-up messages) that can be added to a Web page.

One caveat: despite the templates, this book is too detailed for beginners. For those with some experience, and especially for developers who lack design skills and like the A5design style, this book amounts to an intensive Clint Eccher brain-picking seminar. He offers a few tricks that can be applied to any design (like his tips on how to drastically reduce file sizes) and some good general advice (for example, "Do not get attached to the work" because a client may just decide against it). --Angelynn Grant

Book Info
Through hands-on projects, examples, and case studies, this guide teaches both basic and sophisticated design concepts for creating professional Web sites. Covers the entire design process. Softcover. CD-ROM included.

About the Author
Clint Eccher is an award-winning Web designer with over seven years of experience. He is the owner of A5design, a Web design company commissioned by Fortune 500 companies, national non-profit organizations, and small businesses. He resides in Windsor, CO.

Customer Reviews

Visually stunning but...
All the designs are heavily mortised, require a LOT of nested tables, and are mainly geared toward content-heavy sites with extensive menus. (For those of us who think that paying hundreds of dollars of Photoshop is ridiculous when Paint Shop Pro does the same for 1/6 the cost, be warned the templates are Photoshop-centric.)

As someone already said, these are visually stunning examples, but very tables-intensive which can be time-consuming to edit/code and may be problematic for impaired site visitors who rely on web-reading technology. For the dozen or so examples (and their variations), decide for yourself if inspiration is worth the cost.

Strong, basic coding practices
Apparently, one of the reviewers doesn't know much about coding sites so that they're compatible with all browsers. Using CSS is NOT the guaranteed way to design. I found this book very helpful in understanding how to design a site that satisfies everyone. I tried using CSS to layout sites, but it, unforutnately, is not supported consistently throughout the internet. While I was impressed by the designs, I want to correct this misunderstanding. I know because I've wasted too much time working with the "latest" technology.

Great! Visual Designs, Bad, Bad Coding Practices
The designs in this book are visually terrific! However, as a web developer, my advice to you is: The best way to use the book is to use the visual ideas, simplify them and ignore the author's table design and coding practices. They are not STANDARDS COMPLAINT and do not represent "best practices" that have been developed in web design and development. Nesting tables, as this author does, for example, is what everyone USED to do before building sites with valid Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and HTML became the industry standard.

Why is this important? Building non-standard/complaint websites costs the client a LOT of money in wasted development time, makes changing or updating sites much more difficult, and creates sites that are hard or impossible for people with disabilities to use. This author builds fast loading pages, but the pages would be even faster if the author used current practices.

Use his excellent visuals, but learn to do excellent page coding and development, as well.