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Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates (CSS & XHTML), Third Edition (Charles River Media Internet)
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List Price:
$49.99
Global Home Business Price:
$31.49
Your Savings: $ 18.50 ( 37% )
Subject To Change Without Notice
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Charles River Media
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.7
EAN: 9781584505679
ISBN: 1584505672
Label: Charles River Media
Manufacturer: Charles River Media
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 735
Publication Date: 2008-04-02
Publisher: Charles River Media
Studio: Charles River Media
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Editorial Reviews:
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Learning CSS technology and continually improving one’s 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’s companion CD-ROM! The designs included on the CD illustrate the book’s content and offer you a variety of options—XHTML 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!
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Bad designs and templates
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not for everyone
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great book
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Pick out the good advice, leave the poor advice alone.
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not-so-professional Web design
Comment: 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.
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