From idea to online, your key to great-looking Web sites

Your one-stop guide to building a user-friendly site with professional flair

Whether you're building a site to keep in touch with others, sell products, or promote a cause, you want to make sure yours stands out in the crowd. This handy reference shows you how to design an accessible site, create graphics and navigation menus, build forms, insert sound and video, and keep your visitors coming back for more.

Discover how to

• Plan, maintain, and promote a Web site

• Design with users in mind

• Work with HTML and CSS

• Optimize graphic elements for the Web

• Build your site with e-commerce functionality

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 5 Ratings

Total waste of time - 2008-08-04
Reviewer Rating:
A total waste of time and money. This book attempts to be a jack of all trades and cover every aspect of web design and development. Unfortunately, in so doing, it provides so little actual useful information on each topic that its virtually worthless. For instance, the section on CCS was less than 20 pages. Now I certainly didn't expect a complete, in depth, study of the subject in a "For Dummies" book. Especially since this type of book is supposed to be geared more to the casual user and not web professionals. But the book would be a lot more useful if it covered the basic elements of web design in more depth.

The other thing that made this book worthless, to me in particular, is that the authors assume that everyone who has a desire to build a web page possesses some rather pricey software. Much of the book is dedicated to describing how to build web sites using Dreamweaver and Photoshop. Since I have and use neither, these sections were absolutely worthless. I find this startling since, once again, "For Dummies" books are not supposed to be geared toward the professional. So why would they assume that someone reading the book would possess high end professional development tools? I was also perturbed that these facts aren't mentioned anywhere in the or description of the book.

If you are looking for a good, basic guide on how to design and build web sites, this is NOT it.

Not Bad - 2008-02-08
Reviewer Rating:
I got this book to help me with web design. However I found myself getting lost on some things. I wish they had better examples and actual try this yourself projects to go along with the chapters. I would recommend a simpler book for learning basic web design. This book is a good reference to have on your book shelf if you ever get more involved in web design. Over all Not Bad.

Not really a "book for dummies" - 2009-07-16
Reviewer Rating:
I would consider myself mediocre in understanding some of the Adobe Creative Suite's software but I chose this book above the more obvious books on building websites using Adobe CS4 because I thought that it would be more inspiring. The only thing this book has inspired me to do was return it and use more web-based resources. This book seems to primarily work on the premise that everyone who reads it has some sort of business on building websites already running. I'd almost be tempted to say that those writing the book are more bragging on their success as web designers or the success of friends while adding a minute amount of research information that they've picked up along the way. It seems unlikely that the book was written for those of us who have an average amount of understanding of web-building but are relatively new to web-page design. This book seems as if it was designed to scare away prospective readers from the career of web-page design.

Unprofessional - 2009-11-11
Reviewer Rating:
I just finished reading this book from cover to cover and, sadly, I have to agree with the negative tone of most comments here (up to the time of writing, that is).

- As heard though the grapevine, I concur that the book is published with too many "foolish assumptions" (as the authors themselves call them) in mind. Without any apparent reason, they assume the reader is going to do web designing for a living, repeatedly gearing every subject towards client-designer relations, client satisfaction and the such. There are whole chapters that would make little to no sense without this bias.

- Here comes a major problem for me. The authors' professional work as designers, as well as programmers is, well, not impressive. I guess I can't provide their URLs here, but just try Googling for their names and check them out. Oh, and try "Antonio's Winter Haven". That's good as well.

- They're not ashamed of it, either. Almost every example of web-designing they provide in the book refers to their own personnal or professional sites. In a book 762 pages long, that's a lot of self-promotion.

- In the same vein, well, this may be just me, but I'm also bothered by the authors' constant reference to how "Doug" or "Claudia" (the authors' first names) did this or that. Focus on the reader, will ya?

- The authors are an ex-web designer and a professional photographer, part-time web designer. They repeatedly claim throughout the book NOT to be programmers, which supposedly frees them from the hassle of providing any expertise on the subject. I don't claim, mind you, that they should go into fine detail concerning programming languages. What's more, it is certainly fine that they provide hints as to how to skip the programming part and use instead all the resources that the web provides. What bothers me is the uncertainty they leave you with. What with all the trickery they insist on using to escape the tough programming bits, and after seeing what they have to offer for themselves in the personnal pages they so wildly promote, I wonder if there are many things left unexplained, many resources they don't know about or are unable to handle?

********

In general, I can't say I'm unhappy about having bought and read this book. I DID learn many things I needed to know about web designing, web maintenance and so on.

I did not have a problem with tools such as Photoshop and Dreamweaver being used as teaching material for the book. After all, they are the sector standards, so if a piece of software is to be used as example, let it be them. The authors do, in general, offer choices as to what software to use for each particular task (although there does seem to be an obvious bias towards Adobe products).

This just could AND SHOULD have been a better book in so many ways. I very much enjoy 'Dummies' books spirit and approach, but if this is where they're going, I'm opting out. Readers of a book do not need to excel in the field concerned. Authors do.

everything I would hope to need to know about web sites - 2009-08-24
Reviewer Rating:
Comprehensive material about understanding, planning, and building a web site. Easily understood and prompts one to consider many issues that just does not occur to a neophyte. Well worth the money

Browse Similar Topics

Top Level Categories:
Internet/Online

Sub-Categories:
Internet/Online > Web Development