Clint Eccher has designed professional Web sites for seven years and now makes some of his designs available as templates through his own site (A5design.com) and with his new book,
Professional Web Design. You get 50 templates (each of which features home and second-level pages) and careful instructions on how to adapt them for your own use. Along the way, Eccher offers sound advice on good Web design practices; a little bit about HTML, cascading style sheets, and JavaScript; a look at JPEGs and GIFs; and some insight into `comping` (sketching) a site design for the client's approval.
For the most part, however, this book addresses just those aspects of Web design that readers will need to know in order to successfully utilize the templates. These are designed as `mortised` sites; that is, they are built with nested tables and sliced GIF/JPEG combinations, the kind of design made easy with the advent of Adobe's ImageReady and Macromedia's Fireworks. Although this is not a how-to about using those applications or about creating such sites from scratch, Eccher does help readers learn how to debug and otherwise adjust the source code in order to successfully implement the designs. In addition to trial versions of the major applications, the CD-ROM also contains the JavaScript Cookbook and HTML/CSS Developer's Resource Guide, which provide lots of cut-and-paste source code for all kinds of features (games, sounds, pop-up messages) that can be added to a Web page.
One caveat: despite the templates, this book is too detailed for beginners. For those with some experience, and especially for developers who lack design skills and like the A5design style, this book amounts to an intensive Clint Eccher brain-picking seminar. He offers a few tricks that can be applied to any design (like his tips on how to drastically reduce file sizes) and some good general advice (for example, `Do not get attached to the work` because a client may just decide against it). --Angelynn Grant
User review
Threw it away after ten minutes
Calling this book `professional` in any sense of the word is ridiculous. It is, number one, outdated, with a lot of material on structuring a web page using tables, which has been deprecated for years. I mean, there are people who still do it, but why would anyone teach it? It is outdated and makes for poor websites with a lot of unnecessary overhead.
The templates are neither useful in the structural sense nor are they artistically adequate. I would not publish a webpage using any of them -- the design skill level is simply below the level I consider acceptable.
I spent a bunch of money on this thing and was excited when it arrived. After browsing it for ten or fifteen minutes, I threw it on the floor in disgust. A complete waste of money. You can really learn web design much better by simply searching for tutorials on the internet, and you can get better templates online for free. Or once you learn how to use HTML and CSS correctly (which this book will not teach you) you can make your own structural templates better than the ones in the book.
As far as the design aspect -- well, pure design has such a heavy artistic element to it, it is difficult to teach. But just looking at the hundreds of not-particularly-attractive templates in this book, you can be assured that you aren't going to learn anything startling or `professional` about web design.
An absolute waste of money. I would not recommend this book to anyone.
User review
Excellent reference for someone just starting to use CSS
This is the first book I read on web design techniques using CSS. The book does what the title promises, and provides a wealth of excellent templates and approaches to design layouts using CSS and XHTML (where appropriate).
Chapter 16 in particular proved extremely useful. The author details real life situations where the knowledge presented in the previous chapters can be applied.
Definitely a book I'll be referring to frequently.
User review
Bad designs and templates
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.
User review
Not for everyone
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.
User review
Great book
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.
