World Wide Web: How to Design and Construct Web Pages (2nd ed.)

Citation

Schulz, P. (2002), "World Wide Web: How to Design and Construct Web Pages (2nd ed.)", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 36 No. 1, pp. 53-53. https://doi.org/10.1108/prog.2002.36.1.53.4

This book is designed for individuals who are new to Web design and wish to explore the Internet as an accessible place to publish from any PC or Mac. The book starts off by taking the reader on a tour of what the Internet is through the eyes of a Web designer. It teaches you how to observe and criticise the Web pages that you see when surfing the net and how to appreciate and hopefully incorporate the best design elements into your own Web site. The author has taken a broad view of a well “designed” page. So he does not just refer to how a page looks (although that is important), but makes the reader ask: does the page load quickly? Can I find the information I want? Is the page content appropriate? Can somebody find the page with a search engine? Does the page print legibly?, etc.

He goes on to explain how you should go about designing your own Web site, what you need to think about, how to go about planning the site, how will the viewers find their way around the site and how to think about the relationship between different pages and their content.

This section of the book, which takes the reader through the design process, is excellent. Anybody who wishes to learn about Web design would gain a very good insight into how to plan and design pages, how to construct the content of the site in a way which is useful both to the all‐important search engines and to the end user. The author makes quite an issue of search engines and how they find and rank Web pages and encourages you to plan for this from the start to maximise your possible audience. I thought that this was very sound advice and not necessarily the first thing of which a beginner would be aware.

The second part of the book goes on to explain how you actually make your Web pages. This part of the book is more difficult. It is a slender book at 138 pages and is written as a light introduction to Web design as opposed to the telephone directory‐sized manuals. The advantage of this approach is that the book is not daunting. The disadvantage is that there is less space to explain, how and why things are done. For example, he explains how to create and save your Web page in a program called Notepad, but not where you will find this program. What is more, Notepad is a word‐processor and not a Web design program. This means that, when you save your work, if you misinterpret his instructions to change the file extension or, heaven forbid, you do not know what a file extension is, your Web page will not be a Web page but a word‐processed file. He then goes on to tell the reader to open this newly‐saved Web page in their Web browser. Somebody who is new to Web design will only know how to open a Web page that is on the Internet, not a page saved to their PC. There is no explanation as to how you do this. It is not complicated but, if you have never done it, such a simple instruction could be baffling. My feeling is that, unless an individual is extremely familiar with using a computer and in particular is good at file management and the use of programs such as Windows Explorer, they may find the second half of the book hard‐going. On the other hand, if you are somebody who is confident in using a modern computer, I feel that this book has a lot to offer and would recommend it as an excellent introduction to Web design.