Want to know how to make your pages look beautiful, communicate your message effectively, guide visitors through your website with ease, and get everything approved by the accessibility and usability police at the same time? Head First Web Design is your ticket to mastering all of these complex topics, and understanding what's really going on in the world of web design. Whether you're building a personal blog or a corporate website, there's a lot more to web design than div's and CSS selectors, but what do you really need to know? With this book, you'll learn the secrets of designing effective, user-friendly sites, from customer requirements to hand-drawn storyboards all the way to finished HTML and CSS creations that offer an unforgettable online presence. Your time is way too valuable to waste struggling with new concepts. Using the latest research in cognitive science and learning theory to craft a multi-sensory learning experience, Head First Web Design uses a visually rich format specifically designed to take advantage of the way your brain really works.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 14 Ratings

Not up to the usual Head First standard - 2009-12-13
Reviewer Rating:
I was very disappointed by this book. It does not match what I expect from books in this series, such as the excellent Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML, for two reasons: patchy treatment of the web design process, and downright errors that suggest shoddy research and editing.

*Patchy treatment of the web design process*
This book reads as if it was written by a graphic designer, rather than a web designer. Yes, there is a big difference. Graphic design is about styling and visual presentation. Web design is a much more holistic process, in which visual presentation is indeed very important, but far more is involved.

In particular:
- sites need to be structured in ways that make intuitive sense to users
- navigation and search needs to bring users quickly to what they want (so language and labeling are important)
- interactive elements need to fit with users' mental models (e.g. revealing more detail at appropriate points)
- the design needs to make information findable at a range of levels -- from outside the site (search engines, other sites), to any given "view" of the site itself (note: pages are becoming an outdated concept in the modern web)
- content needs to be written in a way that users find easy to parse.

Inspired graphic design is indeed required to reach this happy state, but it is not the primary consideration. In my view, this book does not pay sufficient attention to the very important processes involved in understanding users, putting together content and interactive elements, and testing / evaluating designs. Design is not just about spatial layout, size, color and imagery; it is about the way that these aspects of presentation draw attention to content and possible actions. It is not sufficient to use "Lorem ipsum" text for content detail: designers need to work with content specialists to ensure that the words and interactivity help users achieve what they want to (and what the site owners need them to). Furthermore, to check that the styling, interactivity and content work for users, you need to watch users doing stuff on prototype sites, and on the live site once your design goes into production. Iterative improvement driven by user observation (and when the website is live, analysis of relevant quantitative stats) is the name of the game.

*Errors*
I was pretty horrified by the recommendations for user research in this book. Not only is the role of user research not stressed enough (see above), but the text and examples are misleading and downright erroneous in places. The authors appear to be confused about how qualitative and quantitative research methodologies differ and are appropriately used. Some of their statements are categorically wrong. Their example methodologies and questions are extremely weak; it is worrying that these are presented as practices to emulate.

If you are not already a user research specialist, my advice is to be very, very suspicious of what this book tells you about user research and look elsewhere for best practice. For instance, Handbook of Usability Testing: Howto Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests contains a lot of reliable advice, as does Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity.

As mentioned by other reviewers, there are several other places where writing and editing appear to have been too rushed to catch typographical errors. As ever, this is annoying, because it forces you to interrupt the flow of your reading to double check your understanding.

*Overall*
I cannot recommend this book. Far better are:
- Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition
- Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works (Interactive Technologies)
- Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design
- Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action

Simplified and Intuitive - 2009-08-26
Reviewer Rating:
If you want a simple aproach to design web sites, especially if you are a developer, this book is for you.

Good book!! - 2009-12-15
Reviewer Rating:
i just some day that i received this product to my country, i live in Peru in SouthAmerica. Only Wait 2.5 weeks and i can read some page and it's very funny the way how the book was design to understand easy for all the persons who can learn about how do you start to design a web page.

How you can improve the web page of your costumers, in a real situation. It's very interesting. I recommend this book for all the persons interested in web Design.

Great resource for beginners, but not for a complete novice - 2009-10-18
Reviewer Rating:
Pros: Easy read. Helpful methodologies. Good references.

I have to admit that I found the format of this book interesting. The writers' tried to inject a lot of character, color and some lightheartedness into something that can become very dry reading. Some aspects becoming tiring after a while, but an overall good job. There are some good strategies here. The books delivers good pointers on how to handle information architecture, lay out a web page and color theory. I also appreciated that the book was sprinkled with links to great online resources for site designers and ideas on how to moved forward once you've read the book.

Cons: Needs more meat

This book is great for folks needing to build simple web sites. That being said, I wish it could have touched a little more on the back-end, server side of developing a web site. It did touch on how to build a blog, but I would have like more discussion on database technologies and how to build an application.

Still a nice job and a learned a few things.

A confusing look at web design - 2009-06-10
Reviewer Rating:
This book is not for beginners or even those with a decent background in web design and HTML/CSS. The Head First series appears to be a web design version of "Idiot's Guide" or "...for Dummies," but it fails to capture the readability and easy writing style of those best-selling series. The authors state outright that Head First Web Design is not a reference book, but its cover differs little from web design reference books, which will cause a problem for unknowing buyers. The book is full of nice details and informative asides, but the layout negates the "keep it simple" mantra repeated in the text--each page is full of distracting illustrations and vintage photographs with one-liners, and the images switch from color to black-and-white with little cohesion. For a book that is supposedly not a reference book, there is little within the Head First Web Design to justify its nearly 500 pages. The authors' enthusiasm and knowledge comes across clearly on every page, but Head First Web Design reads more like a seminar on web design and less like a book.

Reviewed by Angela Tate

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