Web SIte Design

Interactivity by Design by Ray Kristof and Amy Satran

Adobe Press   $40

Anyone designing a website should seriously consider reading this. Not so much HTML technique, but the art and science of designing an interface, which is really what you're doing when you design a web site.

Creating Killer Web Sites by David Siegel

Hayden Books   $45

An excellent overall look at some of the crucial design considerations for Web sites: layout, navigation, typography, file size, color, etc. I don't always agree with him, but I always find his points worth considering. Here is theCreating Killer Web Sites Web site David Siegel's personal site and the High Five Award page, which he started and has been one of the major Web design review sites for longer than most people have been on the Web. This is also the guy who created the fonts Tekton and Graphite, among other things.

Deconsrtucting Web Graphics by Lynda Weinman

New Riders   $44.99

More about site design than specifically about graphics (see her book Designing Web Graphics 2, below). She takes existing first-rate web sites and deconstructs them as a turorial for a multitude of techniques. Here is her Lynda.com site, devoted to Web graphics info, and, of course, promoting her books.

See Designing Interactive Digital Media, above

Designing Web Graphics 2 by Lynda Weinman

New Riders   $55

Weinman has become the defacto expert on Web graphics. She takes it one step further and deconstructs existing first-rate web sites in her second book: Deconstructing Web Graphics (New Riders $45). Here is her Lynda.com site, devoted to Web graphics info, and, of course, promoting her books.

HTML 4 for the World Wide Web, a Visual Quickstart Guide by

Peachpit Press   $18

If you're just starting out with HTML, this is a good reference. I'm not a fan of the Dummies" series. I think they're poorly organized and badly designed. The Visual Quickstart Guides, however, are everything the Dummies books aren't: Concise, well-organized, well designed, immediately informative and just in depth enough to give you real functionality in the program. They're also a bargain at less than $20.

HTML Web Magic, by

Hayden Books   $40

This goes a bit beyond the basics into some of the tricks, tips and work-arounds that help create layouts and effects that are hard to do with "straight" HTML. She goes even further int oJavaScript and dHTML i her book HTML Artistry, listed below in the CSS / dHTML section.

HTML 4.0 Sourcebook by Ian S. Graham

John Wiley & Sons, Inc   $29.95

A bit more textbook-like, but a good definitive source of HTML standards. I'm not entirely happy with the way it's organized, however. If anyone has strong recommendations on the best HTML authoring book they've found, let me know. Thanks.