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Want to know how to make your pages look beautiful, communicate
your message effectively, guide visitors through your website
with ease, and get everything approved by the accessibility and
usability police at the same time? Head First Web Design
is your ticket to mastering all of these complex topics, and
understanding what's really going on in the world of web
design.
Whether you're building a personal blog or a corporate website,
there's a lot more to web design than div's and CSS selectors,
but what do you really need to know? With this book, you'll
learn the secrets of designing effective, user-friendly sites,
from customer requirements to hand-drawn storyboards all the
way to finished HTML and CSS creations that offer an
unforgettable online presence.
Your time is way too valuable to waste struggling with new
concepts. Using the latest research in cognitive science and
learning theory to craft a multi-sensory learning experience,
Head First Web Design uses a visually rich format
specifically designed to take advantage of the way your brain
really works.
Rife with errors (not just typos)Reviewed by Mitchell R. Dunaway, 2010-03-05
I have a feeling that the other reviews of this book were posted by
employees of O'Reilly.
The chapters are disorganized, the writing confusing, and the code
buggy. The authors are often confused on the meaning of design
terms. For example, chapter 2 introduces the concept of a visual
metaphor, but the authors explain it as the use of color and design
elements. They don't seem to be aware of the fact that a metaphor
is a comparison between two things to help comprehension, like
using a tab shape for navigation links. Tab navigation is another
concept that they got wrong. They assign the term
"tabbed-naviagtion" to any sort of horizontal navigation. They
don't seem to understand that for that metaphor to work, it
actually has to look like a tab.
The download files for the tutorials are already complete, making
it harder to follow along in the book. Many of the pen and paper
exercises are not thought out, like on page 209 when they ask you
to draw navigation on a black masthead. The answers to the
exercises are often frustrating, like when they ask you to rename
categories and then the answer on the next page says the category
names were good like they were.
I could go on for days about how poorly put together this book is,
but I'll leave it at that.
Good book!!Reviewed by Felix Miranda, 2009-12-15
i just some day that i received this product to my country, i live
in Peru in SouthAmerica. Only Wait 2.5 weeks and i can read some
page and it's very funny the way how the book was design to
understand easy for all the persons who can learn about how do you
start to design a web page.
How you can improve the web page of your costumers, in a real
situation. It's very interesting. I recommend this book for all the
persons interested in web Design.
Not up to the usual Head First standardReviewed by antenna, 2009-12-13
I was very disappointed by this book. It does not match what I
expect from books in this series, such as the excellent Head First
HTML with CSS & XHTML, for two reasons: patchy treatment of the
web design process, and downright errors that suggest shoddy
research and editing.
*Patchy treatment of the web design process*
This book reads as if it was written by a graphic designer, rather
than a web designer. Yes, there is a big difference. Graphic design
is about styling and visual presentation. Web design is a much more
holistic process, in which visual presentation is indeed very
important, but far more is involved.
In particular:
- sites need to be structured in ways that make intuitive sense to
users
- navigation and search needs to bring users quickly to what they
want (so language and labeling are important)
- interactive elements need to fit with users' mental models (e.g.
revealing more detail at appropriate points)
- the design needs to make information findable at a range of
levels -- from outside the site (search engines, other sites), to
any given "view" of the site itself (note: pages are becoming an
outdated concept in the modern web)
- content needs to be written in a way that users find easy to
parse.
Inspired graphic design is indeed required to reach this happy
state, but it is not the primary consideration. In my view, this
book does not pay sufficient attention to the very important
processes involved in understanding users, putting together content
and interactive elements, and testing / evaluating designs. Design
is not just about spatial layout, size, color and imagery; it is
about the way that these aspects of presentation draw attention to
content and possible actions. It is not sufficient to use "Lorem
ipsum" text for content detail: designers need to work with content
specialists to ensure that the words and interactivity help users
achieve what they want to (and what the site owners need them to).
Furthermore, to check that the styling, interactivity and content
work for users, you need to watch users doing stuff on prototype
sites, and on the live site once your design goes into production.
Iterative improvement driven by user observation (and when the
website is live, analysis of relevant quantitative stats) is the
name of the game.
*Errors*
I was pretty horrified by the recommendations for user research in
this book. Not only is the role of user research not stressed
enough (see above), but the text and examples are misleading and
downright erroneous in places. The authors appear to be confused
about how qualitative and quantitative research methodologies
differ and are appropriately used. Some of their statements are
categorically wrong. Their example methodologies and questions are
extremely weak; it is worrying that these are presented as
practices to emulate.
If you are not already a user research specialist, my advice is to
be very, very suspicious of what this book tells you about user
research and look elsewhere for best practice. For instance,
Handbook of Usability Testing: Howto Plan, Design, and Conduct
Effective Tests contains a lot of reliable advice, as does Web
Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of
Customer Centricity.
As mentioned by other reviewers, there are several other places
where writing and editing appear to have been too rushed to catch
typographical errors. As ever, this is annoying, because it forces
you to interrupt the flow of your reading to double check your
understanding.
*Overall*
I cannot recommend this book. Far better are:
- Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability,
2nd Edition
- Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works
(Interactive Technologies)
- Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application
Design
- Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action
Great resource for beginners, but not for a complete noviceReviewed by A. Sattar, 2009-10-18
Pros: Easy read. Helpful methodologies. Good references.
I have to admit that I found the format of this book interesting.
The writers' tried to inject a lot of character, color and some
lightheartedness into something that can become very dry reading.
Some aspects becoming tiring after a while, but an overall good
job. There are some good strategies here. The books delivers good
pointers on how to handle information architecture, lay out a web
page and color theory. I also appreciated that the book was
sprinkled with links to great online resources for site designers
and ideas on how to moved forward once you've read the book.
Cons: Needs more meat
This book is great for folks needing to build simple web sites.
That being said, I wish it could have touched a little more on the
back-end, server side of developing a web site. It did touch on how
to build a blog, but I would have like more discussion on database
technologies and how to build an application.
Still a nice job and a learned a few things.
Simplified and IntuitiveReviewed by JHON MARREROS GUZMAN, 2009-08-26
If you want a simple aproach to design web sites, especially if you are a developer, this book is for you.
