The Bottom Line
This book is perfect for the designer working on many different types of Web sites. It provides ideas and assistance for creating pages that are accepted as usable by the people who count - the customers. And the help understanding patterns is invaluable.
Pros
- Lots of diverse patterns for sites
- Covers building trust, ecommerce, and homepages in general
- Full color examples
- Examples from sites live on the net
Cons
- None
Description
- The first section covers the basics of building Web pages and customer-centered design.
- The second section is the bulk of the book - the patterns. They include:
- Patterns for site types like educational sites, blogs, Web applications, and more.
- The chapter on navigation shows you ways to create navigation for Web sites and another chapter helps make navigation easy.
- There is an entire section for creating a powerful home page as well as a section to help build trust and one for layouts.
- Patterns for managing content include templates, modules, and personalized content.
- There are 2 chapters on e-commerce patterns, and one for helping customers complete tasks.
- There are chapters on speeding up your sites and speeding search within the site.
- There is even an entire section on creating pages for mobile devices.
- The appendices help you evaluate your sites for usability and more.
Guide Review - The Design of Sites by Van Duyne, Landay, and Hong, second edition
This is a very large book, but it's much more than your standard HTML or Web design book. In fact, there is hardly any actual code in the book. Instead it is filled with pictures and screen shots of designs.
The best Web sites are built on patterns that make them easier for their customers to use. And this book pulls those patterns out and examines them.
If you had the first edition of this book, you'll want to pick this one up. It takes where the first edition left off and brings you more to appreciate and understand about patterns on Web sites.
