Web design books to pump up your site
It doesn’t take a genius to make a professional site that will attract customers to your product and keep them coming back for more. No, all it takes is a good guide—and there are plenty of books that can provide that guidance. Let these volumes be the wind in your sails, the fire in your stomach, the wind beneath your wings, or whatever metaphor you choose. The point is they’ve been proven to work, and you can make them work for you.
1. Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, and DOM by Andy Budd, Andy Clarke, Ian Lloyd et al. Featuring lessons from 10 different web designers, this book will show you how to work within web standards to create vivid and attractive pages. The wide range of designers makes this book perfect for everything from entertainment sites to business homepages.2. Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug. Once you face the hard truth that no matter how good your site looks, a user will not put more than a few seconds into figuring out how it works, you’ll be ready for Krug’s humorous look at improving web usability. Cartoons and diagrams illustrate the proceedings, making this anything but a dull how-to.
3. Pro CSS and HTML Design Patterns by Michael Bowers. Like a dictionary or pattern book for web designers, Bowers’s book contains more than 350 codes for rounding corners, styling text, stretching images, and more. The author has plenty of experience, having started coding at the age of 14, over 20 years before. The book is also organized progressively, so readers who go all the way through won’t be lost.
These are just a few of the options available for designers eager to get started. You can easily find more by searching online, but make sure to check the reviews to make sure they’re right for you.