Web Design Reading
I’ve been thinking for a while that the Otter Necessities web site needs another round of updates. I’ve come up with a couple new things since the last round, and the “Belts” section still needs work. Friday night we went to dinner and ended up at the Schaumburg Barnes & Noble. I found Ron looking at digital photography books, which turned out to be in close proximity to the web design books. I came home with two, and finished the second one yesterday.
Don’t Make Me Think, A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Second Edition, Steve Krug, 2006, New Riders Publishing, Berkeley, CA, ISBN: 0-321-34475-8
and
The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, Jason Beaird, 2007, SitePoint Pty. Ltd, Collingwood VIC Australia, ISBN: 978-0-9802858-9-5 (No, I’m not sure what “Pty.” stands for, and I’m only guessing at Victoria for “VIC”.).
I looked at Don’t Make Me Think a few weeks ago, and even got as far as the checkout counter, where I balked at the $40 price tag for a 200 page (including index) book. This time around I failed to resist, and also picked up Beautiful Web Design (for about the same price and same number of pages - probably a function of supply & demand).
Not surprisingly, the title was what first caught my attention on Don’t Make Me Think, but my interest was really caught when I started flipping through it. The author takes a topic that could be fairly boring - effective design of navigation and usability of web sites - and makes it amusing and interesting. By the time we went to bed Friday night I was over halfway through, and finished Saturday morning.
Saturday evening I started Beautiful Web Design, which is more about the aesthetics of web design - layout, composition, typography, etc - and finished it Sunday afternoon. It’s more serious than Don’t Make Me Think, but avoids being boring. Although I must admit to blowing through the bits on image processing, as that’s a task that I hand off to Ron.
Both books are oriented primarily toward web sites for larger businesses and audiences than mine, but neither one neglects us small fry, either. Some of the issues covered don’t really apply, but most of them do.
As an example of the type of thing that isn’t an issue, there is no competition between departments for space on the Otter Necessities web page, like you might get between, say, the different divisions of Apple. We make and sell leather stuff, and that’s that.
On the other hand, I realized that the site has Too Many Words, and what we had for a home page gave no idea what we do on first look. Ron’s already tweaked what we have for the home page to address that one. I’ve got a bunch more ideas of what I want to do, but I think I want to wait until we get Dreamweaver. On another hand, I still want to know how things work (or should be working), even if Dreamweaver is making the actual code happen.
Currently, the site uses frames to do the side navigation and top bars (we realized the lower bar was a waste of space and blew it away already) are done with frames. I know, frames evil, make frames go away. I converted the pages over to using CSS a while back, but did it in a semi-blind floundering-about way. So yesterday we made another bookstore trip, and I ended up with two *more* web design books - The Art & Science of CSS, and HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS.
Now, with Capricon approaching, I probably should have spent more time over the weekend working on merchandise, but oh well.
(Does this mean I want to be a web designer when I grow up?)