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Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates (CSS & XHTML), Third Edition (Charles River Media Internet)

By Clint Eccher Publisher: Charles River Media

Number Of Pages: 735

Publication Date: 2008-04-02

ISBN-10 / ASIN: 1584505672

ISBN-13 / EAN: 9781584505679 Product Description: Learning CSS technology and continually improving one鈥檚 design and developer skills is essential for every Web designer. Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates (CSS and XHTML), Third Edition educates beginning-to-intermediate Web designers on crucial design issues through general discussion, case studies, and helpful tips and techniques. Using easy-to-understand language and concepts, the book bridges the knowledge gap from XHTML table-based design to full CSS-based design, helping you master the most current technologies and techniques needed. With over 13 years of experience as a Web designer for Fortune 500 companies, non-profi ts, and small businesses alike, author Clint Eccher has learned numerous tips and techniques of the trade and discloses them here, saving you time and potential aggravation by alerting you to potential pitfalls. Best of all, he shares over 200 of the completely customizable design templates that he has developed over the years on this book鈥檚 companion CD-ROM! The designs included on the CD illustrate the book鈥檚 content and offer you a variety of options鈥擷HTML table-based coded Web sites, e-newsletters, signatures, Photoshop-only designs, and CSS-coded designs. These designs not only offer the reader a variety of designs that can be quickly customized and used, but are great for inspiration as well. This is a complete Web design training course and free library of templates all in one! Amazon.com Review: 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 Summary: Bad designs and templates

Rating: 2 I purchased this book because I thought the templates could be useful. I already have a pile of books on CSS and Web Development, but the templates made this book stick out. The templates and designs that come with the CD are laughably bad. I can not imagine a single instance where a professional would ever consider using a template from this book.

If you dig really hard through the templates (several hundred) you might find a couple that could be useful. Other than that they are defintely good for a chuckle. Summary: Not for everyone

Rating: 2 The title is misleading; it is not a professional approach to web page design because it relies on tables for page style. Using tables for design was deprecated by W3C when they developed CSS. A professional, “web standards” page uses CSS for layout and design. Tables are used to make TABLES. This style of design makes it VERY difficult to change or modify a web page later. This is not something professional designers are willing to accept. Tables are easy to learn and this style of web page design is suitable for someone (with some knowledge of HTML) who wants to make their own site. It will help you make a good looking site, save you money and get you up and running faster than you could otherwise. But there is a price to pay for that. It will give you grief if you decide to make significant design changes or want to hire someone to change it for you (they will charge you an arm and a leg to do it). If you might want to design sites for extra money later on, you must make a serious effort to learn CSS. This is not an easy task but has significant rewards. Over ten years ago, W3C realized that HTML had serious limitations and they developed CSS to solve the problem. CSS divides web page design into two parts. HTML deals with the content (the writing, images and stuff like that). CSS deals with design and style (what the stuff looks like, where it goes on the page, color and things like that). The two are VERY different and when you use TABLES as a substitute for CSS, you are creating major problems for those who follow in your footsteps (including you). I hope this makes things clear and helps you decide if this book is for you. One last thing. There are a huge number of resources, free, on the web to help learn CSS web page design. Just do a search for ‘web page css: (design - tutorials - templates). Do a search and learn a little about CSS design to see what you want to do before you decide to buy this. Good luck. Designing web sites is fun, if you have gobs of patience and a very low frustration level. Summary: Great book

Rating: 5 This book was well written. Even though I have been a graphic web designer for several years, I still have some knowledge that I don’t know. I am happy to read new thoughts and study new technology from this book. Summary: Pick out the good advice, leave the poor advice alone.

Rating: 3 This book has a handful of useful things to say regarding the use of graphics, planning as well as a plethora of ready-made web site templates. It is also spotted through with handy advice and clear writing as well as good examples and discussion. There is a huge “if” though. The book has become clearly dated in regards to current web site design practice. This book uses tables for layout and to be honest, xhtml/css is the industry preferred method separating content (provided by html/xhtml) from presentation (CSS). As such, I think those looking for a complete and professional introduction and presentation of current (mid-2007) methodologies would be better served by the following suite of books: Usability Issues

- Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition by Steve Krug Clear Presentation and Introduction to XHTML and CSS

- HTML Dog: The Best-Practice Guide to XHTML and CSS by Patrick Griffiths Advanced CSS Design

- CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions by Andy Budd, Simon Collison, and Cameron Moll Different Designs demonstrating what can be achieved using CSS

- The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web (Voices That Matter) by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag While there are other great books about current best practice, these are the ones that I believe best encapsulate what “Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates” tries to do. I think a 3rd edition of this book is needed to truly update it to current practice. Summary: Not-so-professional Web design

Rating: 2 The title of this book should be “Professional LOOKING Web Design.” The numerous template sites provided look great, and are useful for running by clients and asking “which of these do you like?” However, under the hood, the implementation of these pages is anything but professional, at least not by modern standards of using CSS for layout, and tables only for content that is truly tabular. Instead, the templates rely heavily on tables, and tables within tables, for dividing up the layout of the pages. This can make it hard to customize them (particularly all the chopped-up graphics), and gives you a headache when trying to figure out which cell-inside-a-cell you’re editing. This is exacerbated by the poor layout of the HTML code, with tag pairs that don’t line up, indents that don’t reflect the document structure, and so on. CSS is mostly relegated to providing styling for text. On page 42 of the 2nd edition, the author does briefly address the table-v-CSS issue, and concludes that CSS is more difficult than using tables (I’d disagree) and that not all browsers support CSS exactly the same way (true enough for some features, but in general a small amount of tweaking and testing will let your designs work in all major browsers). There are some useful tips and tricks in this book, and the templates do provide some great *ideas* for design and layout, but not good *implementations*. When you come to designing your own pages, the best approach is throw out the book’s HTML and CSS and start from scratch. Because this book is most likely to be used by beginning developers, it’s unfortunate that it provides so many inadvisable lessons in implementing its templates. left now I don’t have a good modern (CSS) design book in my library to recommend - I’ve found that many great resources are available on the Web, such as w3.org and the CSS Zen Garden. Buy Book at Lowest Price on Amazon

Rating:
2.5 out of 5 by Book123