Product Description

No matter how visually appealing or packed with content your Web site is, it isn’t succeeding if it’s not reaching the widest possible audience. If you get this guide, you can be assured it will! By deconstructing a series of real-world Web sites, author and Web designer extraordinaire Dan Cederholm outlines 10 strategies for creating standards-based designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control—key components of every successful Web site. Each chapter starts out with an example of what Dan refers to as an “unbulletproof” concept—an existing site that employs a traditional approach and its associated pitfalls. Dan then deconstructs that approach, noting its downsides and then making the site over using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). By the end of each chapter, you’ll have replaced traditional, bloated, inaccessible page components with lean markup and CSS. The guide culminates with a chapter that pieces together all of the page components discussed in prior chapters into a single page template.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #247766 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 280 pages

From the Back Cover
No matter how visually appealing or packed with content your Web site is, it isn’t succeeding if it’s not reaching the widest possible audience. If you get this guide, you can be assured it will! By deconstructing a series of real-world Web sites, author and Web designer extraordinaire Dan Cederholm outlines 10 strategies for creating standards-based designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control—key components of every successful Web site. Each chapter starts out with an example of what Dan refers to as an “unbulletproof” concept—an existing site that employs a traditional approach and its associated pitfalls. Dan then deconstructs that approach, noting its downsides and then making the site over using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). By the end of each chapter, you’ll have replaced traditional, bloated, inaccessible page components with lean markup and CSS. The guide culminates with a chapter that pieces together all of the page components discussed in prior chapters into a single page template.

About the Author
Dan Cederholm is an award-winning Web designer as well as the founder of the design and development consulting firm SimpleBits. 

Customer Reviews

Something for Everyone
Another fine book from Dan Cederholm. This time around he divvies a typical web page down to its components - text, navigation, boxes and rows and the layout itself and explains and demonstrates the most bulletproof way of implementing them in a standards-compliant way.

In each chapter he'll pluck a real-world example to deconstruct, tell you why it's not bulletproof and offer a rebuild in a very easy to follow manner using XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets. He'll then explain why his solution is bulletproof.

There's something here for everyone, I consider myself pretty knowledgeable on the CSS front but I've said "Ohhhh, that's neat" a few times already (I'm hopping around the book). Which is another point, it's very accessible in that respect - no reading chapters 1 to 4 before tackling the issues presented in chapter 5 (hypothetical use of numbers).

Beginner or expert alike, I think you'll like this book a lot.

A must for developers, designers, and hobbyists.
If you design or develop web sites then you really have to read this book. You may, as I did, think that you know a thing or two about putting together a website. Well this book in combination with Mark Pilgrim's dive into accessibility guide, and Dave Shea's CSS Zen Garden, have taught me otherwise.

While other texts explain the why, this explains the how - and it does it very well too. This is a hands-on book that takes a number of websites, points out what is wrong with them, and re-creates them using web standards. That is not to say the book preaches in a condescending tone about standards - it simply points out why the bad way is bad and the good way is good. It then does what so many standards evangelists fail to do and actually give practical guidance on how to improve websites.

Even if your eyes haven't been opened to the negative effects of poorly marked-up and low-accessibility websites you will not regret buying this.

Excellent book for intermediate web designers
A best practice CSS & XHTML book aimed at the intermediate-advanced web designer. If you're a beginner looking to learn CSS web design I suggest you look at The CSS Anthology or Web Standards Solutions books first, then come back to this book to polish your skills.

The book dives straight into common approaches to everyday techniques. It makes an explanation as to why it may not be the best solution and suggests `a bullet-proof approach' and justifies its reasoning. The book is one of few with colour illustrations which is nice and makes for clearer example images. The book concludes with a chapter demonstrating all the examples in a single website. There are some good techniques in this book and there's bound to be something new even for the seasoned CSS web designer.