Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates (CSS and XHTML) Third Edition

Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates is written for beginners and intermediates. First of all I have to mention that this book is kind of dated. The book was published in 2008, but it must have been early in the year. I think much of the technology that is discussed is old and out of date. The author does have a newer version of this book and I would suggest looking at that version instead.

 

While someone familiar with design and image formats may find some of the information boring, it could be useful to someone who has no experience in that area. One thing the author could have done to help illustrate some of the image format examples more clearly, is to print the book in color. The whole book except for a few pages in the middle of the book is black and white. This makes it very difficult to visually understand his examples of jpg versus gif. The images in the book looked virtually identical.

 

The author gives you some good concepts to think about when designing a website such as the seven rules of web design. Some of these rules are, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should, it’s impossible to please everyone and try to stay on top of the specifications and standards. Examples of these rules are using Flash animation just because you can, you are always going to have some portion of your audience that is not happy with your design, and you should always keep up with the ever changing standards of the web.

 

One of the major concepts that the author introduces is the term “Mortised”. I had never heard this term used before. He states that there are three web design philosophies: usability, multimedia and mortised. He says, “ Depending on the designer, any of the three philosophies does the best job of satisfying the goal of the website, which is to communicate to the user in the most effective manner.” He says that “mortising” is the combination of multimedia and usability, which is basically form versus function. He gives two unrealistic examples in the book of a “functional” website and “form” website. I have never thought of these two concepts as opposing each other in good design. If you have one with out the other your design is flawed. I guess this is what he is saying a mortised site is, a combination of the two, but I didn’t think you need a special term to describe this.

 

Much of what is discussed seemed like old technology and techniques. The author describes a mortised design as piecing two images together using a table. This seemed like an out of date method to me. It is pretty much the standard to use XHTML and CSS for your whole site and not use tables. The Author did encourage the use of these two technologies, but also suggested using tables mixed with XHTML and CSS to get a mortised design.

 

This book would be most useful for the information in it pertaining to image preparation and some of the web basics. I could only recommend this book to someone who had a very minimal knowledge of design and preparation of web graphics. It would give them a beginning understanding of jpg and gif images, when to use each and how to prepare them. Although, this is information that could be obtained elsewhere. I think if a beginner read this book they would be confused about the technology that is currently out there and would put themselfs at a disadvantage. If you are really interested in this author you might look at his new book on his website www.a5design.com.