Effective Web Design
Product Description
–Learn how to take basic Web pages and turn them into astounding sites with one book; Effective Web Design. –Covers everything from HTML to XML, animation to sound, and site management to marketing: Everything you need to build successful, powerful Web pages. –Includes a full color insert so you can see what the pages will look like, and a CD packed with readers, animators, editors and optimization tools.Amazon.com Review
This is a nuts and bolts coding book. In it are examples showing how to hand-code, in XHTML, sites that include images, links, tables, frames, style sheets–just about everything you might want. There’s also extensive advice on planning your site design, knowing your audience, and doing e-business.
The author’s fundamental approach to effective Web design is what she terms the “cross-compatibility concept,” which is based upon two principles: creating valid code in the first place and creating code that will cause an older browser to either pass on content it can’t handle or offer “graceful degradation.” This runs counter to similar books, which advise serving up different content depending upon the user’s browser.
The book is aimed at those who have used Web layout applications like GoLive, Dreamweaver, or FrontPage, but now wish to know more about the underlying code; s well as those who may already know HTML but would like to learn proper XHTML, especially as a step toward learning XML. The author served on the W3C HTML Working Group as an invited expert, and her confident knowledge in this area is evident in her writing. Her Web consulting company is called WebGeek, which isn’t surprising since the tone of this book is distinctively “geeky.” But anyone looking to sharpen his or her coding skills shouldn’t be deterred by that. Beginners will find the book rigorous, but Webmasters will appreciate the chapter on code validators and how to interpret error reports, and the one on improving a site’s accessibility for the disabled.
Although it’s less effective in dealing with basic design issues like balance and visual unity (it gets marks for effort) or in the homemade (decidedly non-slick) look of sample site designs and graphics, this book does deliver when it comes to the exacting details of XHTML. The index is as thorough as that of a science textbook, and the appendices provide quick access to the XHTML abstract module definitions and all the elements and their attributes. The CD-ROM contains code referred to in the book, along with a lot of shareware and trial copies of Web utilities for FTP, code validating, browsers, and other useful applications. –Angelynn Grant
eFFECTIVE WEB DESIGN is a good html coding book that touches on CSS. In fact, this book includes xhtml 1.1 information, and basics on reading and writing a DTD. The book is a 2001 book, which means Ms. Navarro must have finished it up in 2000 to submit to publishers. Since 1999 was when xhtml 1.0 was published by the standards organization, W3C, covering some of xhtml 1.1, in a writing of 2000, when most browsers barely supported xhtml 1.0 with CSS 1 is looking forward a good bit.
The book is written in the old style, that is graphic design 101, coding plus color theory for impact. Graphics themselves are very lightly covered. An intro to Jasc, Photoshop, and Fireworks are about all you get on graphics.
On one hand, this book is utterly out of date, in the fact that CSS is the primary style layout tool now. On the other hand, because CSS is so loud these days, HTML may be falling by the wayside in peoples necessary knowledge of it.
Either way, this book was ahead of it’s time, and now, only 5 years later is now behind the present time. For the price you’ll get it, it may be the only technical html tutor you might want to bother with.
Rating: 4 / 5