Product Description

Whether you are an intermediate Web designer looking to take your sites to the next level or a more experienced designer looking to improve your professional skills, you will find the tools to meet your needs in Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates, Second Edition. This completely updated version of the best-selling book features the 50 professional-quality, license-free Web design templates from the original, as well as 15 new templates, all of which can be easily customized and extended. Each ready-to-use design includes a homepage, and one second-level page, and the framework to build subsequent pages. All of the specific techniques that are required for building these and other highly usable sites have been updated to cover the latest technologies, including HTML, XHTML, JavaScript, CSS, Photoshop CS, and PHP. Also included are five new HTML e-mail templates, an increasingly important marketing tool. Detailed tutorials and hands-on projects teach both basic and sophisticated design concepts, including how to create designs for low, medium, or high content sites and the strengths and weaknesses of each. The new edition also includes four new chapters on Cascading Style Sheets, using client-side scripting, creating dynamic sites, and an overview of the new Web designs. It covers important topics such as client- and server-side scripting, security, and using databases to update a site,s content.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1059274 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-01
• Released on: 2004-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 586 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 (Fort Collins, CO) is an award winning Web designer with more than 15 years of experience designing and developing professional Web sites. He is the owner of A5design, a Web design company that not only subcontracts to various marketing, advertising, and IT organizations, but also is commissioned by Fortune 500 companies, non-profit organizations, and small businesses for Web design and development. In addition to authoring the previous editions of Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates, which have been published in five different languages, he is also the author of Advanced Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates.

Eric Hunley (Hampton, VA) is an instructor and Web Developer.He has taught and developed numerous courses including 25 different courses at the University of Arizona Extended University, including many on Macromedia and Web design. He is is the author of Web Design with Macromedia Studio MX 2004 and co-author of Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates, Second Edition.

Erik Simmons (Oro Valley, AZ) is an independent designer and illustrator, and is the principal of the online creative studios Vividology.com and FullAfterburner.com. He has won multiple awards for his design work and has served clients such as Hewlett-Packard, UTI, the U.S. Government, as well as several national non-profit organizations.