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Web Pages That Suck
principles of good design - illustrated by critiques of bad sites
This is a web design guide with a twist: it teaches by negative example. Yet it works - and has become a best-seller. The subtitle tells all: 'Learn good design by looking at bad design'.
The idea of learning how to make a nice
website by looking at naff aspects of existing websites, and
avoiding their sucky techniques, is a good one. The book is fun to
read, but you get a lot out of it too. Flanders and Willis have no
wish to impress you with their understanding of difficult, techie
aspects of web design. Their line is that you should
avoid getting carried away and keep things simple
This book shows that you can start a website yourself
and watch it grow into a big and successful thing - because that's
exactly how Web Pages That Suck came to be a best-selling book.
It's based on a website made by Vincent Flanders that got
listed as a Yahoo! Pick of the Week and became very popular. For that reason, it's very well illustrated - and the idea of critical analysis of bad examples is one which has also been proved to be effective by Web guru Jakob Nielsen in his recent Designing Web Usability.
But be warned - it doesn't set out to teach you HTML from scratch, if that's what
you want. It
comes with a free CD full of useful things - but then so
do lots of magazines. You also have to put up with lots of photos of the authors in 'comic' poses. But as writers, they are what the cover says: 'Funny, opinionated, and always to-the-point [with] a reputation for
being the Web's leading critics'.
© David Gauntlett 2000
[more WEB DESIGN books]
Vincent Flanders and Michael Willis, Web Pages That Suck, San Francisco (CA): Sybex International, 1998, pp.384, ISBN 078212187X
Discounts of 40% at Amazon!
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