Product Description

This book/CD-ROM package features 50 professional quality, license-free Web design templates that can be quickly and easily customized. Each ready-to-use design includes a homepage, one second-level page, and the framework to build subsequent pages. Detailed tutorials teach all of the specific techniques required for building these and other highly usable sites, including the basics of HTML, Photoshop, and CSS. Whether you are an intermediate Web designer looking to take your sites to the next level or a more experienced designer looking to improve your professional skills, you will find the tools to meet your needs in Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates. The companion CD-ROM includes all source files for each of the designs covered in the book, complete HTML and JavaScript customization packages, and demo versions of third party software.

KEY FEATURES:
* Includes 50 professional quality, ready-to-use, license-free Web designs that can be quickly and easily customized
* Teaches how to use nested tables and compressed images to develop an attractive, effective, and fully functional Web site
* Provides detailed tutorials and case studies that explain how to create designs for low, medium, or high content sites and teach the strengths and weaknesses of each
* Shows how to upload your site to a server and test for compatibility with Internet Explorer and Netscape
* Explains technical and aesthetic graphics issues, from when to use GIF or JPG images to which design will best suit your content
* CD includes all source files for each of the Web designs in the book, complemented by complete versions of the JavaScript CD Cookbook, 3rd Edition and The HTML/CSS Developer’s Resource Guide. It also provides demo versions of Photoshop 6.0, Macromedia Flash 5, and other valuable third party software

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1229291 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 429 pages

Amazon.com Review
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

About the Author
Clint Eccher is an award-winning Web designer with over seven years of experience. He is the owner of A5design, a Web design company commissioned by Fortune 500 companies, national non-profit organizations, and small businesses. He resides in Windsor, CO.

Customer Reviews

Excellent for design concepts.
In the classroom, when I teach web design, unless the courseware comes with templates the students spend the time creating pages from scratch. While this is worthwhile for novices, there are times when you need templates for some web projects.

In this book the authors has given you over 200 HTML templates, which are on the cd-rom, to work with. By following along with the book you'll end up creating over 50 pages. You find yourself working with frames, forms, tables, graphics and CSS.

The book should have had the design outputs in color to allow you to be able to see what the outcome would like. I did like the 3 case studies included, which take you from a basic web page to a very advanced design layout.

The cd-rom included trial version of Photoshop, FireWorks, Flash and HomeSite all of which have newer versions out and should be updated for the next edition. I found the JavaScript Cook to be a very handy and useful tool for creating scripts without an in depth knowledge of the coding techniques.

The other handy utility included in the HTML/CSS Developer's resource guide, which makes the creation of CSS easier. With all the helpful tool and tricks the book is certainly a welcome addition to my HTML/Web Design library. Overall a very good value for the money.

Visually stunning but...
All the designs are heavily mortised, require a LOT of nested tables, and are mainly geared toward content-heavy sites with extensive menus. (For those of us who think that paying hundreds of dollars of Photoshop is ridiculous when Paint Shop Pro does the same for 1/6 the cost, be warned the templates are Photoshop-centric.)

As someone already said, these are visually stunning examples, but very tables-intensive which can be time-consuming to edit/code and may be problematic for impaired site visitors who rely on web-reading technology. For the dozen or so examples (and their variations), decide for yourself if inspiration is worth the cost.

Good Introduction to Mortised Site Design
As the title says, this is a book on the design of web pages. It is focused on producing designs that reflect many of the modern trends in web design thought. There was a time a few years back when the web sites of all the major companies used Macromedia Flash to animate, that is create movement, on their home pages. For instance, the authors report, quite accurately I think, that such animation has not proven suitable for the majority of web sites. Like Microsoft's "clippy" paper clip "help" thing that used to appear at the bottom of Word/Esce./Etc. a lot of people really don't like moving things.

These authors really like mortised sites. This design philosophy uses tables within tables within tables to provide the view the authors are trying to create. The designs they give in their fifty included templates are of the mortised type. The trouble with mortised sites is that you have to receive all of the information for the site before the browser can begin drawing the tables on the screen. With todays fast processors, this is not usually a problem. But they can get dreadfully slow if you are accessing them over a slow line, especially if they include a lot of graphical images.

The back of the book says this is for Beginner to Intermediate. This does not mean the Front Page level beginner. You'd best have some idea about HTML before you start this one. I'd say it's an intermediate level book, which is reflected in the wording on the back page.