| | |  | Computer Security | Home » » Small Websites, Great Results | | | | | | | Description: | | The goal of this book is to serve as a design/idea book. Our mantra is that simplicity leads to great results. Small Web Sites, Great Results will show readers basic strategy and introduce them to the philosophy of doing more with less. The book features design guidelines to make sites look professional even on a small scale, techniques to get the hits from search engines, and more. Users will learn to construct a holistic Web presence that garners real results. An added benefit of this concept is that along with the book there is a simple Web site system, a series of pages, and scripts which will accommodate the principles presented in the book. Users may go to the site, download the frameworks, and instantly post them for their own use.
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Doug Addison | | Paperback:
| 289 pages | | Publisher:
| Paraglyph Press | | Publication Date:
| November 19, 2004 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1932111905 | | Product Length:
| 9.94 inches | | Product Width:
| 8.08 inches | | Product Height:
| 0.8 inches | | Product Weight:
| 1.58 pounds | | Package Length:
| 9.84 inches | | Package Width:
| 8.03 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.79 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.59 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 16 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 16 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 found the following review helpful:
 A Good, Practical GuideJan 12, 2005
By Amy M. Brownlee
It's easy to lose sight of the basic needs of the user when building a website, but if you're smart enough to read this book and enlist its theories in your plan, you'll end up with a useful, intuitive, and profitable site. The text is direct in its message and is easy for inexperienced web designers to understand. Screen shots clearly illustrate good and bad examples. Thank you, Mr. Addison, for showing us that bigger is not better.
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
Clear, concise, timelyJan 07, 2005
By Bianchi Joe
Doug Addison's thesis here is that many, if not most, websites are too cumbersome to fulfill the needs of the average Internet user, and that frustrating your potential customers is no way to get their business. His clear recommendations for improvement are sensible and timely; one doesn't have to look very hard to find examples of "bloated" websites with their aggravating redirects and obscure pathways. Addison has practiced what he preaches in this text: he doesn't muddy the water with redundant prose or needlessly technical jargon, so even a neophyte like myself can easily navigate the often complex world of modern web design. This is required reading for anyone interested in their first website, and it should be required for any experienced web designer who thinks that bigger is always better. Some of the graphics are a little small, but Addison's decision to use real web pages to illustrate the good, the bad, and the ugly of the Internet provides the reader with up-to-date, concrete examples that augment his text rather than simply decorate it. A very useful and enlightening guide.
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 Creating effective sitesJan 05, 2005
By M. Goddard
The plus sides of this book is that it shows people that bigger is not always better, incorporating all the bells and whistles is not always productive in creating an effective web site and finally a web site should be about the users and not the designers or business.
I have a number of years in the web development arena and I have read a LOT of books on the subject. Doug's book is very refreshing for the simple fact that there are not a lot of books of this type of information available today. From the beginning of the book, he gives you clear cut information and examples of his thoughts on web site bloat and how to prevent it. As the book progresses, he then starts showing how to develope the "plan" of creating a lean and mean site and avoiding bloat. Thus improving customer relationships and turning visitors into customers.
My only complaints about the book are the images for the web site examples were a bit small and really relied on you visiting the site to view and compare. What happens if the site updates their site!! :)
It is a great book for people thinking about getting their business a web presence and doing it with the least amount of headache and the max amount of information. Plus seasoned web designers/developers can learn a thing or two as well about keeping sites geared more towards customers and users than themselves etc.
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
good for graphics designersDec 02, 2004
By W Boudville
Addison is directing his book to a person, possibly of a nontechnical background, responsible for designing a website. The emphasis here is on a clean, simple design. The book gives a top-down approach. It helps you with the design and deliberately eshews discussing the programming aspects of how to implement it. That is the remit of other books. Put it this way. There is only one explicit mention of HTML tags in the entire book. Leave most of that stuff to the programmers. Instead, Addison spends much attention on showing a good website focus that a reader will quickly understand.
Also, that one instance of an HTML tag refers to the META tag. It does not affect the visible aspect of a page. But you need to craft this to help search engines classify your pages for maximum exposure to queries. Important for any website.
So without knowing HTML, you can still get a practical understanding of what can be designed with it. Hence, the book might appeal to you, if your strength is in graphics design, and not coding.
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
 Good book, missing a strong focusDec 01, 2005
By A. S. Johnson
"seeking change"
I like this book. It contains a strong summary of basic website design concepts in chapters 1-5. These are ideas that can be found elsewhere, but this book has them combined in a succinct, easy to comprehend format. For me, the book started to lose it in Chapter 6 where the author goes into a discussion of marketing. I felt that the topics here were very superficially covered, and he had too broad a focus. He tried to cover web marketing from a traditional marketing standpoint, and there are much better books that cover general marketing. He also touched on website placement. His comments were so minimal though, that I didn't feel they gave enough knowledge to the reader to really make a big difference. It would be better to find a good book on search engine optimization and skip that portion of this book.
Chapter 8 presents some good ideas on how to utilize a professional web designer, and chapters 9 and 10 cover site maintenance well. Chapters 11-15 have some good examples.
The other comment I have about the book is that the author seems to artificially apply everything to small sites. Much of the design advice he gives applies to large sites as well, yet he always states that they are small site design concepts.
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