Book Details

Authors: Rachel Andrew, Craig Grannell, Allan Kent, Christopher Schmitt

Publisher: friends of Ed

ISBN: 1-59059-409-6

Price: U.S. $39.99

General: Released August 2004, 289 pages

Table of Contents

1. Entertainment Site: U2FAQ.com
2. News Portal
3. Corporate Website Draft One
4. Intranet Design Project

Book Structure

As a collection of case studies, this book doesn’t hang around – there are no programming background chapters, it's straight into the scenarios. So although the code is clearly explained, to get the most out of the book I would suggest you're familiar with Dreamweaver MX 2004, and you should have a reasonable grasp of both Cascading Style Sheets and a handle on the theory behind building database driven websites (that is an appreciation of databases, SQL and server-side scripting).

If you're newer to either of these areas you'll want a CSS and, if appropriate, a scripting text alongside you to help you appreciate the code – though of course even if you follow the instructions blindly you'll get a site out at the end.

The book has two chapters on primarily client side design projects: Christopher Schmitt's U2FAQ fan club site and Craig Grannell's corporate site, and two database driven websites: Allan Kent's PHP/MySQL based news portal and Rachel Andrew's ASP (VBScript)/Access based intranet site.

In all cases the emphasis is on building CSS based, standards-compliant, accessible sites that are flexible, easy to maintain, and of course reach the maximum appropriate audience.

Chapter Coverage

As might be expected the chapters follow a similar structure – starting with an outlining of the aims of the site and consideration of the target audience, the basic design is discussed and the site coded.

To dig into this a little deeper it's worth comparing and contrasting the sites in pairs. Taking first the client side design projects; the book opens with the U2FAQ and the emphasis in this chapter is on analysis and planning almost as much as implementation. This sets the book off, if you're reading it sequentially, nicely in terms of the mindset projects should be approached with.. In contrast the corporate web site chapter is able to worry about analysis slightly less, but spends more time discussing the implementation covering input forms, legacy browsers and even mentioning the need to obfuscate e-mail addresses to minimise spam. Both sites make use of Dreamweaver templates.

Moving onto the database-driven websites, while the projects share ostensibly similar facets (setting up a database and building log-in pages), the scenarios addressed and technologies used make for very different chapters. The news portal chapter builds an understanding of competitive sites and the type of user features a site visitor expects to have access to (the ability to e-mail stories to a friend, good search facilities etc.).

Here the need is just to restrict access to one area of a site to authorised users, while for the intranet site the log in is required to differentiate users and provide different levels of access to sensitive features or information. The intranet feature requirement is also significantly different, with the project discussing document sharing and making use of a free third-party Dreamweaver extension to provide a calendar functionality. 

Technologically the major difference between the two chapters is the choice of server-side combinations with the news portal using PHP/MySQL, and the intranet being based around ASP(VBScript)/Access.

Personal Assessment

In my opinion this book does what it says on the cover – four good authors have put together four solid case studies to cover a range of scenarios. As you would expect from this author line up and the publisher (foED), the text is clear, readable, code is well explained and there are plenty of screenshots to aid orientation. The approaches taken lead to accessible, maintainable CSS based designs that will, if followed, ensure your coding will be addressing current concerns and using appropriate standards compliant techniques. This isn't a book that is suitable for learning CSS (or PHP/ASP from) but provides a great accompaniment to texts that do.

From my own point of view the potential weaknesses of the book are also its strengths. For example, by the very nature of design projects certain steps are repeated each time. For example deciding on your audience, profiling them and, if appropriate, looking at other competing sites. This is of course reflected in the content, and I can imagine some readers thinking 'Yeah, yeah just get me to the code, I didn't want to read a discussion on personas once, let alone twice'.

But of course good planning is crucial to the success of a project, and similarly each project will have slightly different audiences, leading to different designs. The discussions of such steps aren't laboured and are well presented. There are small bits of technology explanation that are repeated, but there again each chapter does function as a stand-alone unit.

Conversely some may think there's too much variety of server-side technologies, with both PHP/MySQL and ASP/Access covered in the same book. However most web developers often have to fit in with client requirements, rather than their own preferences, so the ability to be conversant (if not fluent) in more than one server-side technology and aware of different databases is desirable.

Overall, in my opinion, if you're a beginning or intermediate level Web designer looking to firm up those CSS skills, and build your experience in the area of database driven websites, I think this book will provide a nice addition to the bookcase.

Think about it this way; looking at the $39.99 cover price, how often are you going to be able to get a Web design WITH detailed explanation, off someone of the quality of these authors for just $10!