No matter how visually appealing or content-packed a Web site may be, if it's not adaptable to a variety of situations and reaching the widest possible audience, it isn't really succeeding. In Bulletproof Web Desing, author and Web designer extraordinaire, Dan Cederholm outlines standards-based strategies for building designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control--key components of every sucessful site. Each chapter starts out with an example of an unbulletproof site one that employs a traditional HTML-based approach which Dan then deconstructs, pointing out its limitations. He then gives the site a make-over using XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), so you can see how to replace bloated code with lean markup and CSS for fast-loading sites that are accessible to all users. Finally, he covers several popular fluid and elastic-width layout techniques and pieces together all of the page components discussed in prior chapters into a single-page template.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 113 Ratings

Good for intermediate level web designers - 2009-09-16
Reviewer Rating:
Book explains common techniques for avoiding browser display incapabilities when dealing with W3C standards. Note that you will need some knowledge of CSS before reading this.

Taught me so much - 2009-07-24
Reviewer Rating:
This book have some of the very practical and real life examples that I had trouble with when I try to design my own website. Floating (arhg!!), shorthands, rounded corners, gradients, paddings, some IE bugs, fluid layouts (major!), optimizing and reduce file size and images. All are addressed here in the book.

I started learning CSS about a week ago, I couldn't even float anything right. With some basic knowledge coming in, the book taught me so much. At the end of the book, chapter 9, putting all the techniques together, I was able to do design a website without even reading the instruction.

It took me about 24hours in total to get through and learn and take notes of everything in the book.

So for those beginners, get one of these, or check out your local library.

Cheers.

Good read, not for real beginners though - 2009-06-26
Reviewer Rating:
A good book if you have already played with CSS and read some CSS reference work or a more beginner-orientated book, such as Rachel Andrew's CSS Anthology. Dan does not start back from the basics as Rachel nicely does, but Bulletproof Web Design is very effective in teaching you three essential skills:
- make your website resistant to scaling and variable resolutions
- organize a clean and flexible "table-like" layout with floats
- remain readable for tiny devices and low-end browsers.
A very pleasant read with a constant and comfortable rhythm, teaching you a limited number of concepts but then crucial stuff for designing a clean and robust CSS website. Well done Dan.

Sets the bar for style books. Outstanding examples. - 2009-04-20
Reviewer Rating:
You would hope a book on web style would be easy to read and well-presented. Well, this book lives up to its hype. No boring opinions. It's styled as a step-by-step tutorial. It's the best technical web I own. What a refreshing, pleasant, and exceptionally well-researched and well-presented book! He takes several real-life web example pages and re-does them according to his bulletproof method.

We re-did our entire website according to this book and everything was better: clickthroughs, reduced bounce rates, faster page loads, and better maneuverability.

I also suggest buying "Letting Go of the Words" by Reddish, which I consider a great accompaniment to this book. "Letting Go.." will teach you how to take the concepts in the Bulletproof book even further by testing actual layouts.

You do NOT need to know CSS or style sheets to read this book. In fact this book will teach you what you need to know. But just enough - it is not a CSS reference.

Talk about a sobering experience on how bad my web pages were! I enjoyed a healthy 20% improvement within the first few changes.

The other books I read are all just awful, so make sure to buy this one. I have shown this to my other engineering/web friends and they are really impressed.

Good INstructional Book - 2009-03-29
Reviewer Rating:
This book addresses some aspects of web design that I had not previously considered. I liked the way in which the affect of each CSS change is illustrated, such that the reader can see the result when each CSS rule is applied, as opposed to simply showing the end result of applying a bunch of rules. I was able to glean a number of new ideas from reading this book and a better understanding of the construction of quality web pages.

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