Web Style Guide, 2nd Edition
Posted: Fri Jul 14, 2006 4:16 pm
Web Style Guide, 2nd Edition
By Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton
Review by: Alex
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There are many arts to website design, from choosing colour schemes, typography and laying out your information in an easy to read format. Though there are no specific rules which must be followed to promote good design, there are certain principles which are held by designers which will help make your website more popular, therefore promoting more traffic. The book also manages to give you ideas for things you may wish to include in your website such as website indexes and explains how these can be best achieved and integrated into your website. This book gathers its information from a wide variety of sources and manages to bring together some good models for working based upon the ideals of professionals in the field and the book itself is from the Yale University Press which gives it instant credibility. What makes this book more unusual from the other books in website design is that the book can actually be accessed (in its entirety) for free on the internet at http://www.webstyleguide.com so you may be wondering why I purchased this book? For the simple reason that I've used the online guide many times and having a version i can "port" with me wherever i go. The information in this guide is very useful and will help people new to website design (or those who are developers already) to learn what website design is all about and what actually makes up a website design. The book also includes basic references to Accessibility, Usability and standards based design which is good as it promotes careful coding standards. If you are a student studying website design then this book is a great place to start. It's concise and brings up some important points which must be considered if you wish to become a website builder. In this modern world of Accessibility and Usability standards, this book takes practical advice from the world of design and explains their importance and how standards based design is ever critical when making your site visible to everyone. Therefore this is a book which every student of website design should have on their shelf.
The chapters are as follows... Chapter 1 explains the processes that need to be taken into account when deciding that you are going to develop a website before you actually start producing it. Chapter 2 shows you the importance of interface design and how the main graphical front-end should be produced. Chapter 3 discusses site design and where everything in your site should be put and what sections of the site should be reserved for and how the actual structure of the content should be setup. Chapter 4 mentions the design of individual pages and how code and graphical interfaces come together to produce what will be the end result of your interface. Chapter 5 mentions the importance of using correct typography and explains how typefaces work and how your design can be inhibited by bad typeface usage. Chapter 6 says about editorial style and how best to lay out your content, this information is very useful if you are interested in any forms of content management (CMS) or if you are a blogger. Chapter 7 explains how and when graphics should be used in website design and how colour and formatting can affect the end result of your site. Finally Chapter 8 tells you the usages of multimedia and internet rich content on your website, by doing this the book does pretty much an entire full circle on most aspects of design that people will come across.
This book is suitable for the following types of people interested in website design:
By Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton
Review by: Alex
[attachment=2420]attachment[/attachment]
There are many arts to website design, from choosing colour schemes, typography and laying out your information in an easy to read format. Though there are no specific rules which must be followed to promote good design, there are certain principles which are held by designers which will help make your website more popular, therefore promoting more traffic. The book also manages to give you ideas for things you may wish to include in your website such as website indexes and explains how these can be best achieved and integrated into your website. This book gathers its information from a wide variety of sources and manages to bring together some good models for working based upon the ideals of professionals in the field and the book itself is from the Yale University Press which gives it instant credibility. What makes this book more unusual from the other books in website design is that the book can actually be accessed (in its entirety) for free on the internet at http://www.webstyleguide.com so you may be wondering why I purchased this book? For the simple reason that I've used the online guide many times and having a version i can "port" with me wherever i go. The information in this guide is very useful and will help people new to website design (or those who are developers already) to learn what website design is all about and what actually makes up a website design. The book also includes basic references to Accessibility, Usability and standards based design which is good as it promotes careful coding standards. If you are a student studying website design then this book is a great place to start. It's concise and brings up some important points which must be considered if you wish to become a website builder. In this modern world of Accessibility and Usability standards, this book takes practical advice from the world of design and explains their importance and how standards based design is ever critical when making your site visible to everyone. Therefore this is a book which every student of website design should have on their shelf.
The chapters are as follows... Chapter 1 explains the processes that need to be taken into account when deciding that you are going to develop a website before you actually start producing it. Chapter 2 shows you the importance of interface design and how the main graphical front-end should be produced. Chapter 3 discusses site design and where everything in your site should be put and what sections of the site should be reserved for and how the actual structure of the content should be setup. Chapter 4 mentions the design of individual pages and how code and graphical interfaces come together to produce what will be the end result of your interface. Chapter 5 mentions the importance of using correct typography and explains how typefaces work and how your design can be inhibited by bad typeface usage. Chapter 6 says about editorial style and how best to lay out your content, this information is very useful if you are interested in any forms of content management (CMS) or if you are a blogger. Chapter 7 explains how and when graphics should be used in website design and how colour and formatting can affect the end result of your site. Finally Chapter 8 tells you the usages of multimedia and internet rich content on your website, by doing this the book does pretty much an entire full circle on most aspects of design that people will come across.
This book is suitable for the following types of people interested in website design:
- Students or people interested in looking at the art of website design for the first time.
- Website developers who want to gain some insight into standards based site design.
- Designers who would like to make their websites more compliant and standards based.