If you don't, perhaps you should consider it. Design patterns are a way to create a site that is unique to you or your company, but uses conventions (sometimes called "best practices") that your customers will understand.
Image courtesy Prentice Hall.
The second edition of The Design of Sites by Van Duyne, Landay, and Hong can help you learn Web design patterns and them implement them on your Web site. The first edition of this book was good, but perhaps a bit ahead of its time, but in this second edition they have improved it and given lots more patterns for you to use. And the Web design industry is far enough evolved to understand the value of a book like this.
Image courtesy Prentice Hall.
Exceptional topic Jennifer. Unfortunately, I’m not that far along with my web dev career. I did read the original “Design Patterns” book (be very impressed, LOL) so I know where you’re coming from.
Kudos. Keep moving us forward.
Sounds like a great read, if I could find anything on the 2nd edition. All links point to the 1st edition (c.2002) and seems terribly outdated (CSS was just beginning to take off in ‘02 – now its an everyday thing). I would be interested in seeing how the new edition stacks up as it sounds like a fantastic concept.
Robert: Wow, that was incredibly lame of me. You’d think I’d notice that the second edition cover is RED not blue. I got hung up on another problem when I was posting this article, and was just so glad that I could find anything to link to that I didn’t even recognize that I was looking at the older edition of the book. d’oh!
Anyway, I’ve fixed the link inside the review to point to the second edition and I’m working on getting the cover shot corrected now.