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Sue Jenkins’s Web Design All-in-One for Dummies, a Book Review

A Look at Sue Jenkins’s Web Design All-in-One for Dummies

Sue Jenkins’s Web Design All-in-One for Dummies serves as a decent resource for improving your website and even for starting your own web development business.

It’s chockful of ideas but one glaring omission was a CD (this shows how long ago I first wrote this blog post!).

It would have made some sense and improved matters considerably if some of the concepts could have been shown not only on the page but also on a computer screen. There were references to the Dummies website but that’s only semi-helpful.

But that’s a fairly small quibble.

But What Does the Book Really Get Into?

The book spends a lot of time talking about the web development business, and gives tips on how to deal with clients. This is all well and good but does not work for someone such as myself who is building a site for my own purposes but not necessarily as an entrée into a new career.

Furthermore, there is something of an overreliance on Dreamweaver. For amateur web designers not interested in forking over nearly $400 for the software, those sections of the book were also eminently skippable.

Plus it helps a great deal if you already know some HTML and CSS. She explained both, but not in depth.

Some Help

However, these caveats aside, the book is a helpful resource. Interesting tips abound. These include how to make a plain printing stylesheet for a page needing separate printer formatting, like a resume. There is even a small section on SEO. However, it does not cover everything that can be done. For that I would recommend Michael Fleischner’s book.

While this book is somewhat more advanced than a beginning web development work, it struck me as being intermediate in scope. It ended up good for a lot of things, but perhaps a bit incomplete. For more advanced techniques and ideas, I’d recommend looking for works on not only design but also on usability. But this is a great place to start.

Rating for Dummies?

Review: 3/5 stars.

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