Seeing your name in lights is always exciting, but not in this book because it means your Web page sucks! It’s more fun to learn how to do something by looking at what NOT to do. That’s the approach taken mixed with humor in Web Pages That Suck from authors Vincent Flanders and Michael Willis.
Written in the first person, Flanders and Willis tackle poorly designed websites. They encourage Web designers to keep it simple, usable and valuable via content. Beginners will appreciate the real-life visual aids and advice of what to avoid in web design like not using counters (to count how many people have come to your website).
You’ll find plenty of counters in use around the web and they don’t mean a thing. To increase the counting, all you do is repeatedly reload the page. They don’t tell you how many *unique* visitors arrive at your website.
Expect a lot of styles, fun, and attitude to push you into understanding good web design. Sure, they offer common sense advice like avoid overdoing graphics especially animated graphics and watch those backgrounds. Yet, we still see these same mistakes today.
People visit websites because they want something usually in the form of content. The book covers how to market the Web site, attract customers, obtain accurate search engine listings, and motivate visitors to return. Though Google, a popular search engine, is not mentioned (it didn’t exist at the time), the advice is equally applicable to any search engine.
You’ll find little HTML and style sheet coverage. This is a “show me” book and coupling this with other references will enable the beginner to be better prepared to dive into web design.
Also included is a sprinkling of how to create a storyboard. Some beginners don’t realize the importance of this step. I admit when I first created web pages that I knew nothing of storyboards until I took a class.
It’s a quick read and its strength is covering aesthetics and functionality. The Web sites mentioned in the book either don’t exist or have updated the Web sites. Not to worry, there are plenty of screen shots so you can see them in their original “sucky” form. This is a learning experience since you can check out what the sucky Web sites are doing today and determine what they’ve improved.
Flanders explains, “While the sites have changed, the concepts remain the same.” He also says that instead of 60Kb pages when the book was published, it’s now 200Kb pages that are considered too large. That’s my thought exactly about the book – concepts apply, but variables change.
In today’s information overloading times, the authors put the important tips on the sides of the pages to make it easy for readers to scan and read.
The book and its companion Web site especially the Daily Sucker and Mystery Meat Navigation should help keep your name out of any future editions of the book or related articles.
VITAL STATISTICS:
TITLE: Web Pages That Suck: Learn Good Design by Looking at Bad
Design
AUTHORS: Vincent Flanders and Michael Willis
PUBLISHER: Sybex
PUBLICATION DATE: March 1998
ISBN: 078212187X
FORMAT: Paperback
PAGES: 288
PRICE: US$39