Professional Web Design. This item is unavailable.Professional Web Design

Whether you are an intermediate Web designer looking to take your sites to
the next level or a more experienced designer looking to improve your
professional skills, you will find the tools to meet your needs in
Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates, Second Edition. This
completely updated version of the best-selling book features the 50
professional-quality, license-free Web design templates from the original, as
well as 15 new templates, all of which can be easily customized and extended.
Each ready-to-use design includes a homepage, and one second-level page, and the
framework to build subsequent pages. All of the specific techniques that are
required for building these and other highly usable sites have been updated to
cover the latest technologies, including HTML, XHTML, JavaScript, CSS, Photoshop
CS, and PHP. Also included are five new HTML e-mail templates, an increasingly
important marketing tool. Detailed tutorials and hands-on projects teach both
basic and sophisticated design concepts, including how to create designs for
low, medium, or high content sites and the strengths and weaknesses of each. The
new edition also includes four new chapters on Cascading Style Sheets, using
client-side scripting, creating dynamic sites, and an overview of the new Web
designs. It covers important topics such as client- and server-side scripting,
security, and using databases to update a site's content.

KEY
FEATURES
* Covers the entire design process, from gathering requirements
and creating a comp, to enhancing usability, designing for scalability,
developing architecture, and simplifying navigation
* Explains technical and
aesthetic graphics issues, from when to use GIF or JPEG images to which design
will best suit your content
* Teaches you how to upload your site to a server
and test for compatibility with Web browsers

On The
CD-ROM
* EXAMPLES - Includes all of the samples from the book
* SOFTWARE -
Includes an Open Source Web server package (containing Apache, MySQL, PHP, and
Perl), trial versions of Adobe Photoshop CS and Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004,
and JavaScript CD Cookbook 3rd Edition and The HTML/CSS
Developer's Resource Guide software
* WEB SITE TEMPLATES - Provides the
50 license-free, ready-to-use templates from the original edition, 15 new
templates, and 5 HTML e-mail templates

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
PC:
600 MHz Intel Pentium III processor or equivalent; Windows 98 SE (4.10.2222 A),
Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003; 192MB RAM (256 MB
recommended); 280MB available disk space; Color monitor with 16-bit color or
greater video card; 1024x768 or greater monitor resolution; CD-ROM drive; MAC:
Mac OS X 10.2.6 and later, 10.3; 500 MHz Power PC G3 processor; 192MB computer
RAM (256MB recommended); 320MB available disk space; Color monitor with 16-bit
color or greater video card; 1024x768 or greater monitor resolution; CD-ROM
drive

Clint Eccher has designed professional Web sites for seven years and now makes some of his designs available as templates through his own site (A5design.com) and with his new book, Professional Web Design. You get 50 templates (each of which features home and second-level pages) and careful instructions on how to adapt them for your own use. Along the way, Eccher offers sound advice on good Web design practices; a little bit about HTML, cascading style sheets, and JavaScript; a look at JPEGs and GIFs; and some insight into "comping" (sketching) a site design for the client's approval.

For the most part, however, this book addresses just those aspects of Web design that readers will need to know in order to successfully utilize the templates. These are designed as "mortised" sites; that is, they are built with nested tables and sliced GIF/JPEG combinations, the kind of design made easy with the advent of Adobe's ImageReady and Macromedia's Fireworks. Although this is not a how-to about using those applications or about creating such sites from scratch, Eccher does help readers learn how to debug and otherwise adjust the source code in order to successfully implement the designs. In addition to trial versions of the major applications, the CD-ROM also contains the JavaScript Cookbook and HTML/CSS Developer's Resource Guide, which provide lots of cut-and-paste source code for all kinds of features (games, sounds, pop-up messages) that can be added to a Web page.

One caveat: despite the templates, this book is too detailed for beginners. For those with some experience, and especially for developers who lack design skills and like the A5design style, this book amounts to an intensive Clint Eccher brain-picking seminar. He offers a few tricks that can be applied to any design (like his tips on how to drastically reduce file sizes) and some good general advice (for example, "Do not get attached to the work" because a client may just decide against it). --Angelynn Grant