Unless you're abnormally gifted, the best way to learn a craft thoroughly is to learn not only its central tenets but also its pitfalls. Here, authors Vincent Flanders and Michael Willis teach you good Web design by pointing out ugly, misguided, and confusing sites--any site that fails to deliver good graphics and clear, well-focused content. As the authors show you all sorts of corporate and personal pages, they help you determine your target audience, design your site and its navigational elements and content, and solve problems concerning graphics and text. You also learn about using tables versus frames and get an introduction to hot technologies such as plug-ins, cascading style sheets, XML, databases, VRML, Java, streaming video and audio, videoconferencing, and chat. Finally, the authors address maintenance and marketing issues, teaching you how to set up an appropriate domain name, update your site, register your site with search engines and directories, and use reciprocal links and banner ads. The authors address cross-platform issues and Netscape/Microsoft incompatibility issues where appropriate. This is a full-color book, with enthusiastic, amusing writing as well as helpful screen shots and tips on Web-design software. The companion hybrid CD-ROM includes utilities for creating GIF animations, style sheets, and HTML pages and for creating, compressing, and optimizing Web graphics.

Review

In my opinion, Flanders and Willis were brave souls to trust that their offbeat style would successfully carry over to print. Yet, it is hard to deny that the approach works. I would even be roused to say that the book is superior and far more handy than the Web site. While they basically have the same content, the book is much more user-friendly. Accessing and understanding the information is easier because it is better organized. The bottom line is that the content of the book is excellent, and the authors’ offbeat style makes the book enjoyable.

Judging from their cover art and photographs, you might think that the authors are morons. You would be quite wrong. They aren’t morons, they’re oxymorons -- they look and sound like nutty, capitalistic hippies. And that’s fine. They wallow in the fact that they are Internet rebels and I greatly enjoy their bizarre style. The result of their bold approach is ridiculous but purposeful...Read more from this review--John S. Rhodes, Dr. Dobb's Journal -- Dr. Dobb's Journal

See all Product Description

Tag this product

(What's this?)

Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items.

Customer Reviews

45 Reviews

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(7)

Average Customer Review

3.8 out of 5 stars (45 customer reviews)

Share your thoughts with other customers:

Create your own review

Most helpful customer reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Suck it and See, Jun 13 2001

Victoria Kingham (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Web Pages That Suck: Learn Good Design by Looking at Bad Design (Paperback)

As someone who spends a great deal of time browsing for suitable course books I look for content with readability, simplicity, clarity, and relevance. I'm currently in the business of raising the IT awareness of non-IT people so a lot of mainstream IT textbooks are unappealingly dense. It was refreshing to find something that didn't lose sight of basic ideas among the available plethora of fancy technological structures.

This is not necessarily a book for arty or techy designers. They would almost certainly find it too simplistic. On the other hand a business person who is commissioning a website or someone who is quite new to it all (yes, there are plenty of them out there!) could well use it to remind them not to be thoroughly seduced by available technology; designers and programmers naturally want to show off their skills and experiment and might thus lose sight of what their customer wants. I'd recommend this as a basic design guide to someone who needs to commission a website and doesn't have much time to delve into the details.

Whether the technology is out of date or not is irrelevant as IT books, like almost all technology, are likely to be out of date soon after you buy them. The book provides a route to ideas checklists and a set of pointers which are accessible to anyone. Certainly it's repetitive and a little short on content for the price but people who buy it may not be reading it page for page so this would have the effect of ensuring that they don't miss important points. Whether the authors intended this effect is another question.

Whether it's funny or not really depends on your appreciation of the look and feel of early 70s hippy geekdom. The ha ha in-your-face humour may be unpalatable to busy thrusting 21st century thrusting entrepreneurials. I'm a sort of affiliate geek so I found it tolerable. And of course I made a few allowances. They are Americans, after all.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Report abuse

1.0 out of 5 stars Deserves less than a star, Jan 3 2003

samantha peters (Pittsburgh PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Web Pages That Suck: Learn Good Design by Looking at Bad Design (Paperback)

If you've been to his website, you will see just how truly un-knowledgable the author is.. He's funny, articulate, and rock stupid as far as target audiences and economics. This book, and the corresponding website (which may I add crashes the latest version of IE) is not even slightly useful to the serious web enterpenuer.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Report abuse

4.0 out of 5 stars A learning experience, Aug 16 2002

"jnelsonca" (Anaheim, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Web Pages That Suck: Learn Good Design by Looking at Bad Design (Paperback)

This was an interesting, funny adventure learning about websites and what makes them good or bad. While some of the sites they mention are no longer available, they do provide examples of positive and negative applications that can work for anyone. Their humor and good nature makes this an easy read.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Report abuse

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review

› See all 45 customer reviews on Amazon.ca

Want to see more reviews on this item?

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 49 reviews 3.8 out of 5 stars

Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars More web page deigners should heed this book's advice.
Some reviewers claim this book is outdated. If that's true, then why are there still so many sucky websites? I still see commercial sites with pages over 200kb in size. Read more

Published on May 21 2002 by Daniel J. Prinzing

1.0 out of 5 stars Boring, NOT funny, and totally outdated.
I was utterly unimpressed by these two fools. They rant about design and then throw pictures of themselves on the cover of their book??? Read more

Published on Nov 11 2001 by Jim