[.uk] Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates (with ... (ISBN 1584500662)

Book Description:
This book/CD-ROM package features 50 professional quality, license-free Web design templates that can be quickly and easily customized. Each ready-to-use design includes a homepage, one second-level page, and the framework to build subsequent pages. Detailed tutorials teach all of the specific techniques required for building these and other highly usable sites, including the basics of HTML, Photoshop, and CSS. Whether you are an intermediate Web designer looking to take your sites to the next level or a more experienced designer looking to improve your professional skills, you will find the tools to meet your needs in Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates. The companion CD-ROM includes all source files for each of the designs covered in the book, complete HTML and JavaScript customization packages, and demo versions of third party software. KEY FEATURES: * Includes 50 professional quality, ready-to-use, license-free Web designs that can be quickly and easily customized * Teaches how to use nested tables and compressed images to develop an attractive, effective, and fully functional Web site * Provides detailed tutorials and case studies that explain how to create designs for low, medium, or high content sites and teach the strengths and weaknesses of each * Shows how to upload your site to a server and test for compatibility with Internet Explorer and Netscape * Explains technical and aesthetic graphics issues, from when to use GIF or JPG images to which design will best suit your content * CD includes all source files for each of the Web designs in the book, complemented by complete versions of the JavaScript CD Cookbook, 3rd Edition and The HTML/CSS Developer's Resource Guide. It also provides demo versions of Photoshop 6.0, Macromedia Flash 5, and other valuable third party software

Not-so-professional Web design:
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. Right 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.

Pick out the good advice, leave the poor advice alone.:
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.

Not for everyone:
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.

Worthwile for any web developer:
This book gives some good insights into web design, and is worth reading by any web developer no matter how experienced.

Great book:
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.