Web Site Design Goodies [Paperback]

Zev Saftlas, Author of Motivation That Works: How to Get Motivated and Stay Motivated

PS this book helped me open my own website!

Yes, and I'm a bit behind this week. :> I also hate those form letters. arrgggg

This is a great book for anyone who is starting out and wants to try to figure out who their site is for and why people will want to visit their site. This was the first thing I thought about when creating mine, but often people just have an idea and run with it. With the advice in this book, you can :

Plan your site for your audience
Create meaningful text and navigation
Add images and other visual enhancements
Communicate with your visitors
Find the best ways to promote your site

Joe Burn?s has a HTML Goodies Web site and there you can learn HTML, JavaSCript and other website creation tools. He has been creating websites since the first version of Mosaic was released. Since then, he has taught thousands of people to build great websites. Including me. ;) Well, I do the best I can.

A lot of people think building a website is very difficult because they think you have to know HTML, but the truth is, if you get FrontPage, you don?t have to know very much.

The Contents Include:

Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged
Before Your Write a Word
Begin the Design
Your Site and Your Server
Text and Color
Links, Links, Links
Images and the Visual
Hello? Anybody Here? How Many?
Outside HTML
Promoting Your Site

There are great ideas like looking at who your competitions is, finding out how you want to design your template, choosing a font that can be read and making your site more well-known by word of link.

The author is also "so" correct about his ideas on "critiquing" other sites. That is a great idea because then you learn what you like and don't like. One of my main concerns was navigation.

There is also some great advice on domain names and what you should avoid. I guess using "the" in my one name isn't suggested, but then again, it has worked for me.

While I'm not so concerned about how to read HTML, I do like having a basic understanding. There are some tags and their functions listed on pg. 140.

For the longest time, I had no idea what the difference between a "hit" and a "visitor" was.

I just purchased my own URL for another 9 years. I'm in this for the long haul! People say they sometimes get lost at my site in a good way, so I think this book helped me.

It is strange, but when I first put up my site, I had webmasters arriving from who knows where telling me what I was doing right and wrong. It was the best thing to ever happen to me in regards to my site. If you are willing to take constructive criticism about the construction of your site, you will find people are very willing to give great advice. Of course if they tell you to change the background on every page, run, run, run quickly.

Well, the way I've built my site, I have no idea how that would be done unless I go to every single page. I assume there is some logical secret, maybe just changing the one image would solve the entire conundrum.

Great book for anyone just getting started. This has lots of the basics. You can also visit his site for added information.

~TheRebeccaReview.com

I think the thing I liked most about this approach to site design is that Burns keeps it absolutely free of HTML version-specific or browser-specific gimmicks. A previous reviewer panned it because Burns didn't give examples of how to use transparent GIFs, pixel shims, etc. -- well, thank goodness, becuase that would've ruined the entire premise of the book. Burns advocates for knowing your target audience, knowing what your "killer app" is, and then doing everything you can to deliver as much of that "killer app" to your target audience as you can. He also advocates against throwing images or elements onto a page/site just because you can, or because it's the "newest" thing; he does hammer this over and over, and I think that's valuable for a large number of part-time amateur web authors who have never really thought about *why* they have a site, or what they put on it.

The other thing I really liked were Burns' critiques at the end of each chapter. It's very easy to find things you don't like & knock them; anybody can do that. Burns goes beyond this, though, and offers suggestions for improving site design, praise for things well done, and a chance to see how different design concepts are carried out by all levels of author.

It's not an HTML "how to" book, so if that's what you want, I'd recommend another of the author's books, "HTML Goodies." But, if you're new to site design, or are very experienced yet want to improve upon what you already know, this is a great book.