Website Design and Development: 100 Questions to before building a website
A useful book and video package to build and maintain a successful web siteHow you know that you have done everything possible to create a unique, enriching, and successful website, especially when you recruit others to do it? With Website Design and Development, you will feel confident that you have exhausted all facets of building a website. The smart question and answer format to help you through easily overlooked details that acts as a virtual consultant. You get clear, easy-
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Web Designer PC CD entry level graphic HTML website page development site editor
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A winner in a class that can never win,
Website Design Development is the type of book but I’m glad someone is willing to write. Thankful because it is such a thankless task – every web designer will have some dispute with the questions selected/deselected, or with design principles or the rating of importance. And, yes, I also don’t always agree with George Plumley.
However, the structure of the book itself is a testament to Plumley’s ability to present information in appropriate sized units, to provide the tools to relate information on this page to other pages, to allow further exploration via sidebars and DVD, to choose appropriate fonts and colors. The book is so well designed for paper format that one immediately trust’s the author’s ability to produce appropriate web site formats.
The chapters consist of questions built around a particular issue: domain name, hosting, e-mail, design and layout, user experience, construction, content, marketing, search engine optimization, security. These issues represent the full spectrum of elements of a website. This is a real strength as many similar books present only the business view, the techie’s view or the user’s view.
For each question one finds:
- a very readabile description of the issue and the elements surrounding it
- a visual indicator of the importance of the issue
- very well done examples
- tips, notes, warnings and references to the dvd resource
- rules of thumb
- a list of the related questions
- a list of action items
All the sidebar items are excellent examples of clear, succinct writing. The list give cross-references in a very unobtrusive and manner.
I would prefer that maintenance, blogs and forums receive attention – and a bit less time be spent on marketing and promotion … but as I said initially, writing a book like this is a thankless task. I thank George Plumley for taking it on.
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|A great overview for businesses,
I’ve been building business websites for more than 10 years. I can tell you that most businesses are spending way too much on their sites. They do this mainly out of ignorance — they don’t know a lot about interactive communications so thus can easily be oversold by development companies and agencies.
One book I’ve suggested to my customers for a few years is Building Web Sites All-in-One For Dummies. For a book with “dummies” in the title, it provides a very good overview of how professionals approach a site build. Unfortunately, it is almost 800 pages and many of my clients just can’t bring themselves to start it, let alone finish it.
That’s where “Website Design and Development” comes in. It covers much of the same material as the “Dummies” book, but it’s shorter and easier to read. I can tell this was written by a design/development guy — it’s structured for scanning, just like a good site.
Knowing a little about online design and development can save you and your business — and I’m not kidding, here — thousands of dollars. Considering you can read this book over a weekend, I honestly don’t understand why you’d hire an interactive agency without reading this first. You’ll soon know 1) how to see through the smoke of development jargon, 2) which features your particular site needs and which ones it doesn’t, and 3) how you can best gauge your site’s projected scope and success. (You’ll also enjoy the site build more because you can be more intelligently involved in the entire process — and the process is kind of fun.)
Nutshell: The “Dummies” book mentioned above is still my recommendation for the layman with an interest in really sussing the build process. If you don’t have that much time — or stamina — then “Website Design” is a great second choice.
NOTE: This review is not aimed at folks who are actually going to build a site, but at those laymen who want to know the process so they can intelligently oversee and participate in such a project. If you want to actually build a site yourself — do the coding, image editing, programming, etc. — you’ll need a different set of books.
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