opinions on web design book sought

[julesjones]

Okay, so I need to make my website look pretty and not like something built just after HTML 4 came out. Now, even if I throw some money at one of my friends to do some site design for me, I'm going to be the one maintaining it, so I'd better be able to understand what someone else's code is doing. Any of the geeks got an opinion on the new edition of "Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics" by Jennifer Niederst Robbins? That looks like the sort of thing I need, and it's got good reviews on the US Amazon site, but if anyone's got a personal opinion to offer before I spend $LOTS on a shiny new textbook...

Book details here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Learning-Web-Design-Beginners-StyleSheets/dp/0596527527/

ETA: suggestions for good web-based tutorials are welcome, but I am almost certainly going to need a dead tree version for at least some of it. I don't do well with online stuff; I find it *much* easier with a physical book, even if it's the exact same words.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Jules: I used a Dreamweaver product a while back for web management. The site was designed by someone else but my job was to maintain it and the Contribute program was fabulous. I could simple go in, add pages, links, etc....and still maintain the layout and general look/feel of the site. Easy Peasy. Of course I was a complete newbie. Perhaps you need something more advanced?


Anyway, I can't read technical books for shit. Too ADD to follow the instructions. I start doodling in the margins. Mostly nekkid men. I'm guessing, Mr. Scientist, you'll have a much better time of it. :)

[lisabea.livejournal.com]

Oopsie. Forgot to sign in. Heh. So that was me. Could you tell?

[julesjones]

I'd say the nekkid men give it away, but that doesn't really distinguish you from a good many people who hang around here. :-)

I'm hardcore and handcode, but I also use very basic html. This is mostly because when I first started playing with html, I quickly decided that cleaning up the crud in the auto-generated stuff took longer than just typing it myself... I should really get an authoring tool, but I get very twitchy about accessibility issues because of the period I spent using Dragon Naturally Speaking, when I found out how many websites were designed on the assumption that everyone uses a mouse and has perfect vision. There is a reason why my site Just Works in the lynx text-only browser.

One of the things I need to do is to learn how to use CSS so that the site looks pretty, but still Just Works if you see it without the pretty stuff. There's a site called Zen Garden which has a really nice set of demos of what you can do with CSS, and learning to do something like that has been on my To Do list for two or three years now. I just never get around to it.

(Oh, and I'm actually Ms -- I thought that item of information had spread by now, but apparently not. :-)

[lisabea.livejournal.com]

Of course that last bit is the bit that stands out in my mind.

Oops. Seems to be my word du jour.

[julesjones]

You are far from the first, and I doubt you'll be the last. It's not just that I write m/m -- online I seem to come across as male to a lot of people, so much so that even some of the folk who *know* I'm a women occasionally refer to me as "he".

[lisabea.livejournal.com]

... I should really get an authoring tool, but I get very twitchy about accessibility issues because of the period I spent using Dragon Naturally Speaking, when I found out how many websites were designed on the assumption that everyone uses a mouse and has perfect vision.

My son attempted the Dragon Naturally Speaking program about 4 or 5 years ago. Didn't work for him. Too labor intensive for a 4th grader. Now he just types away (he has a bizarre motor skill issue which allows him to play the guitar like a dream but can't write...I'm starting to think he just hates writing :)) Anyway your comment makes me wonder just how horrid my site is for the visually impaired, since I rely almost completely on how things "look". Which is a metaphor for a much larger issue, I'm sure.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Get thee down to your local PC world and browse the books they have on the shelf. Computer textbooks *differ* so much that I would not trust reviews and bought-unseens: I'd want to pick it up, flip through it, see whether I liked the results, and whether I liked the way it was organised.

But to be honest, I probably would not bother with a book; I'd go and look for tutorials on the web and look for software that made my life easier. (I can reccommend Mac Stuff, but fail at Windows).

And http://www.csszengarden.com/ for examples of designs that work well. (And some that don't, but that's the nature of the beast.)

In webdesign, less is more. Most manuals I've seen try too hard to use a milion and one tricks; and that's find if you want to play, but you get 80% of the mileage out of a few basic HTML commands and design principles: make the design easy on the eye and easy to read, keep it as simple as possible, remember that small blocks of text are easier to read than long or wide ones, use graphics to give the user a preview of what to expect (whether you use a text button or a graphical one or a mixture doesn't matter) and unless you're constructing something of the complexity of livejournal, try not to have more than six or seven categories and don't go more than three levels deep.

[julesjones]

[snicker] I was just quoting Zen Garden in my reply to lisabea while you were typing your reply. Great minds, etc... I was looking at it at the weekend, and there are some ideas in there I'd really like to use for making my site prettier and more comfortable to read while still being accessibility-friendly, but first I need to get a feel for how to use CSS.

I really need a dead tree book. Grateful though I am for W3C Schools, I don't do well reading off a screen. But you're right about finding a real copy and flipping through it. I must go into town in the next couple of weeks and have a browse through Waterstones.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I was serious about PC World. Maybe you're close to a bigger Waterstones than I, but I've found that they tend to have a very comprehensive selection of books from the 'for Dummies (which ain't bad) to techie.

Yeah. Great minds, and great site. I tend to go back there from time to time. I have an ambition to one day design my own template, because it is *such* a wonderful idea.

(I do seem to recall that you're on a Mac... if so, I'll heartily reccommend PageSpinner. I'll reccommend it anyway.)

[julesjones]

A large branch of Waterstones is currently easier for me to get to than a large branch of PC World, and I need to go into town anyway. :-)

I followed a link from Zen Garden, and found an online tutorial that actually works for me, so I've spent the afternoon working my way through the first half of it: http://www.htmldog.com/guides/

I've started cleaning up the code on index and main (though not uploaded to the live website yet) as I go along in the tutorial, and have a much better grasp of what I'm doing with it than with any other online tutorial I've tried. My aim is to tidy up the content of the top level pages and get content and presentation properly separated, then think about making them look prettier.

Sorry, WinXP machine here. predatrix is the MacOS Menace. :-) Which always makes for fun when trying to shove files around on joint projects...

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Looks like they publish a book, too ;-)

Thank you for finding this. It's one of the most useful tutorials I've seen, and definitely among the clearest.

By the time you hit a bookstore, your site will be all sorted.

Jennifer Niederst

[pariyal.livejournal.com]

I learnt web design from Niederst's Web Design in a Nutshell, so I'm quite confident that her other book will be as good. I'm not a beginner any more, but I may seek it out regardless as reference.

Re: Jennifer Niederst

[julesjones]

Thanks. I did find a good web-based tutorial in the end, but I'd like to get a book as well at some point.