Web Menus with Beauty and Brains [With CDROM]

If you already understand the basics of web design, this book will take you one step furthur. You'll quickly learn how to build effective, user friendly and compelling navigation into a site and how to organize information to give visitors the best interactive experience by allowing them quick access to what they need.This book is an excellent, no nonsense, "roll up your sleeves and get it done rapidly" book that is thankfully low on jargon, buzzwords and puffery and high on technique and standards compliant code. I recommend it highly.

The problem with web design books is that they all seem to be written either for the beginner or for the person with ten years of art training or programming background. This book at first appeared to be for beginners; and in fact, I probably knew 80% of what's in it. (I teach beginning Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Fireworks, and know a lot of the rules of design, but I was born without an art gene. Plus as a freelancer, sometimes I go long enough between jobs to forget what I learned from my last site.)As I read this book from cover to cover, (skipping the Flash and Wireless chapters)I realized that its excellent summation of many design points was serving as a solid, mid-journey, take-stock refresher that let me put my knowledge into a new context. For example, Wendy takes issue with exporting an entire sliced page from a graphics program into an editing program. It took me two years to decide that YES, that way is easier, and now Wendy Peck has forced me to rethink about a faster way.But most of all, I was very happy with the unexpected chapter on liquid design. I've spent uncountable hours trying to figure ways to acheive this: Wendy gives me an excellent starting point, mostly because she did the math to figure which fixed widths were the best compromise for stretching from 640 to 1200 pixels. Now what I really, really want is a book that starts from that chapter and goes on to demonstrate liquid design in a dozen different circumstances with step-by-steps that are as clear as Wendy's. WOULD SOMEBODY PLEASE WRITE THAT BOOK!!! And if it offers really useful coverage of the aspects of CSS that can be trusted to help achieve it without going to browser sniffing, I'll not only recommend it for all my classes I'll send the authors a cake and light candles for their successful life. PS: Something I expected from this book and didn't get was an authortative summation of the chaos surrounding points versus pixels and the implications of making menus one and body text the other. As a consolation prize, I got excellent tips about using anti-aliasing fonts for small type menus and a sample of those fonts on the CD. (Haven't opened the cd yet, but if it has the problems other reviewers complain of, web references are also given for these fonts.)

Wendy Peck has created the most useful and usable web design book I've ever found.More than just menus, this book puts the 'how-to' behind the idea that "the ideally constructed site has routes from everywhere to everywhere else" (p.10).Exercises, practices, and illustrations range from identifying your customer to coping with DHTML chaos, and quite a bit in between. The CD-ROM actually enhances the text treatment of each topic.I especially appreciated the agnostic selection of software tools the author demonstrates throughout the book. This is not a vendor-sponsored showcase. Good job Hungry Minds publishers.

Wendy Peck is a knowledgeable web designer and a wonderful teacher. She knows how to translate technical information into an enjoyable and understandable format. I felt that my skills in web design had been expanded each time I finished a chapter.Although she covers the design and execution of web menus in depth, the book is also full of valuable advice on a wide range of topics such as understanding browsers, intranets, and wireless devices. As for designing menus, every possible angle is covered from browser compatibility to graphics production. There are sections on creating attractive text menus for wireless, liquid design for any browser resolution, automation and template tricks, and testing methods. There is even a chapter on how to create really tiny text that you can actually read. If she missed anything, I can't think of what it is. I don't usually buy web development books. They are expensive and the information is often found on the web for free. I browsed this one in a bookshop and got pulled in. It turned out to be the best of both worlds, a satisfying read and a well organized reference book.