Rating: 
Summary: Get in line to learn super-fine web design
Review: Computer? Check. Design program? Check. Good design sense? Uhh...For those of you who are still "uhhing", we heartily recommend a copy of this useful tome to cure what ails you. Williams and Tollett offer useful and sound advice for winning the woeful website design war. The authors start out with a very rudimentary and, in our opinion, superfluous lesson on what the web is, and how to use a search engine among other novice topics. After all, the title says the non-designer's web book, not the non-internet user's design book; we think the basics could have been skipped or the user referred to another beginning internet user’s book. But soon the meat of the book is reached, and boy is it juicy. Williams and Tollett spend considerable time expounded on color theory, good vs. bad design, and other useful topics. (We especially appreciated the tip on how to load large files-very helpful.) If you are a beginner, we recommend you buy this book, as it will enhance your efforts to become an all-star web designer. If you are an intermediate or advanced user, get this from the library. After you absorb the few new tricks in the book, you find little worth its purchase price. A caveat: if you are not a Mac and Photoshop user, you will have to take the extra step of translating the tips onto a useable format for you system and software. Including information for those millions of us on Windows and FrontPage or other software would have given this book the five stars we wished to bestow upon it.... P.S.: We must admit that we used The Non-Designer's Web Book in the process of building our site until it (the book, not the site) was dog-eared and coffee cup stained.
Rating: 
Summary: Web Design Concepts With a Lighter Touch
Review: Too many web design books approach the subject with a jargon-laden, heavy-handed approach--not so with THE NON-DESIGNERS WEB BOOK. Williams and Tollett explain the Web, as well as design concepts, with a touch of dry humor and a unique, ultimately readable style. Reading this book is a joy due to its simple, accessible style and conversational language. It's probably one of the few web design books you'll ever read from cover-to-cover. Who is this book for? It's mostly for the design novice. If you have any amount of experience working with the Web and creating websites, some of this stuff is going to be a little simplistic. Even so, read this book for the design concepts it presents. Too many so-called web designers know the technical aspects of creating a website, but fall far short when it comes to design skills. The basic principles put forward in this book will make you a better designer. They certainly worked for me! If you're designing a website and you know nothing about design, invest in this book. It's a sure winner!
Rating:
Summary: Very complete for the beginner!!
Review: This book was awesome! It is generated toward the beginner with very simple explanations and wonderful pictures so you know exactly what they are saying. But even the experienced web designer can gain from this as you see your own work through more simple eyes.
Lots of ideas, explains from thought through concept, even shows you what NOT to do. Touches bases on color, graphics, search engines, typography. I was very impressed by this book and if you are a beginner this really is the book for you. I was very surprised to the amount of information and the wide range it covers in such a little book!
Rating:
Summary: Sharp but unbalanced
Review: The authors of HTML books tend to fall into three categories: Coders, Tech Writers, and Designers. Robin Williams belongs proudly in the last category, and it shows. Four chapters of sharp and specific advices on design are accompanied by 12 rather watered-down chapters on web basics - with no coverage of HTML itself! Apparently Robin decided to target her book to amateurs and graphic designers who think they can do everything on Dreamweaver and other graphic tools, thus never have to deal with the messy HTML plumbing ... Not so! Web and browser technology still have many idiosyncracies, and any serious web designer will soon have to master the actual plumbing works - in all its glorious variations. For that, there is no shortcut to a step-by-step study of HTML and CSS - perhaps the Molly Holzschlag book. She, however, is not technical enough to write it. Robin Williams shine when she lays out realistic (and above-average) examples and explains why they work (or not). Her chapter on typography was outstanding - she analyzes each of Microsoft's near-universal web core fonts, pointing out their strengths and weaknesses, and discourses on the use of Arial vs. Helvetica (one for screen and the other for printing). No other book goes into such detail. I give her four stars for this chapter alone. The perfect HTML book would probably be Laura Lemay/Holzschlag teaming with Robin (and maybe Lynda Weinman). Failing that, getting both Holzschlag and Robin Williams is not a bad substitute.
Rating:
Summary: An invaluable, easy-to-follow, highly recommended manual
Review: Now in an updated and expanded second edition, The Non-Designer's Web Book offers the aspiring web designer a complete instruction guide for such World Wide Web basics as how to use it, including searching for information and building web pages. Robin Williams and John Tollett effectively collaborate to explain the difference between print and web design, basic design principles for the web, various approaches to interface and navigation design, and what makes an effective or ineffective web design. The Non-Designer's Web Book shows when to use different graphic file formats, how to prepare images (including simple animations), tips and techniques by expert web designers, and how to get ready-made graphics. After a website is finished, Williams and Tollett show how to text and repair a website, upload and update a website, register and promote a website. The Non-Designer's Web Book is an invaluable, easy-to-follow, highly recommended manual for the novice webmaster.
Rating:
Summary: Very good, but...
Review: This very fine book is well written, beautifully illustrated and generally most helpful. However, there are two parts to the book. 1. How to create a web page.
2. How to create an outstanding web page. The 2nd part is outstanding, but the first part suffers from trying to be all things to all people. There are many web authoring packages, so I decided on the free FrontPage Express and Internet Explorer. The authors admit that they prefer Netscape, and appear to have a preference for the Mac. While they tried to be helpful to people who made my choices they failed. I was unable to finish the first exercise because their instructions on how to create an internal link makes no sense in FPExpress. If you are comfortable with web design, and want to learn about design, color, balance etc. this is the book for you. But if you, like me, still find the whole idea of creating a web page intimidating you would be advised to find a different book; perhaps returning to this one when you have mastered the basics.
Rating:
Summary: Someone Is Hiding on Alcatrez Island
Review: This is a fabulous story written beautifully by: Eve Bunting. It is about a boy named Danny that gets in trouble with a gang called the outlaws. He ends up running and catching a boat to Alcatraz to hide for a while. He meets a girl named biddy on the boat. He starts taking the tour and he sneaks off and hides. Meanwhile he doesn't know that the outlaws are on there way over to find him. So he is walking around and he sees one of the outlaws and starts running. He gets away from the one but there are three left. They spot him and he starts to run and he sees biddy so he stands by her thinking that it would stop them but it didn't. The outlaws took both of them hostage and held them up in the prison. There is only one person on watch and that is an elderly woman named Mabyline. She has her headphones blaring and the TV going so she can't hear anything. Do they escape or is death there only escape. You will have to read and find out more.
Rating: 
Summary: A good start
Review: So, you want to learn to the craft of web-design and want a beginners guide to help you do it? Well, there are lots of design books out there, and perhaps none of them will tell you everything you need to know. This book is decent; it has a lot of tips that are useful and some good ideas. But most of what it teaches is either common sense or stuff you'll pick up anyway as you experiment with your software. The book's main strength is in its pictures--there are tons of them, and most of the examples are very good. This will provide the reader with somewhere to start. Unfortunately, the tips are not all that great. Most of what is preached in this book is a matter of personal preference, things like screen resolution and alignment. The authors give good suggestions on how to do things, but they make it sound like it's the only way. It's not. It's true that you have to follow certain rules of style as you build a website. Color, contrast, and spacing are all very important, and if your site's an eyesore or is hard to use, people won't frequent it. But, all in all, it's called 'design' for a reason. It's your baby, do what you want with it. That is the main weakness of the book--it's just a little too rigid in its so-called rules. For those who want a book on web-design that is easy to understand, this will prove useful. But there's nothing here that a little experience won't teach you.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Very Good
Review: Forget this book! There's a better solution. I bought this book based on my experience reading the author's Non-Designer's Design Book. I would strongly recommend buying that. The Web book though, is trying to give you overall information on a variety of software that really benefits no one particular user. A lot of the generic tips are good, but included is a lot of information on specific products, such as Photoshop, that are promoted as the ultimate for Web design. Photoshop is very expensive, and I already have Corel Draw and PhotoDraw. Most beginners would not run out and buy Photoshop anyway. Aside from the scattered info about various software, there are also too many mistakes. As is pointed out in many other reviews here, Netscape is not preferred, and has not been the leading browser for a long time. Page 208 has a serious mistake recommending loading an entire page size graphic in order to get a horizontal block across a page. A color filled table is the correct approach. This was unfortunately typical of many errors that I found. I have to admit that I was looking for a more design oriented book since I have some Web authoring experience. After reading the book I believe I can offer a better solution to someone looking for both design and Web building information. First, buy Ms. Williams Non-Designer's Design Book. Second, decide on which Web authoring software you might want to use. Third, buy or scavenge all the written information you can about that software. This way you will have the design information, and you'll have specific information about what YOU will actually be using. Many of these books give tips peculiar to Web design. For someone that's an absolute Internet novice, start with a book that tells you what that's all about first. They're plenty of them out there.
Rating: 
Summary: Marginally useful for beginners, but not for anyone else
Review: I say "marginally useful" for beginners, because I really question the basic level of knowledge and experience the book seems to be catering to: if you don't know what a search engine is, or an ISP, or the very basic differences between document types (such as HTML vs Word vs images), WHY is ANYONE encouraging you to throw up (and I use that term on purpose) a web page? There is always a certain progression of skill and ability in any creative trade, from basic exposure, to wide exposure, to basic knowledge of how to create, to advanced knowledge of how to create, to the ability to teach others how to create. We seem to be skipping several steps with this book; it's like asking someone who learned to read six months ago to take a whack at magazine layout or book publishing. It just doesn't make sense. The author does, as has been mentioned, have a definite Mac bias. It's fine to have a preference, but to push it in the face of the other 95% of PC users is a bit absurd. Same with the author's blatant bias toward Netscape. Telling readers that "most web designers prefer Netscape's ability to precisely control display of elements," when, in fact, every professional organization I know of praises Internet Explorer for more closely following industry-accepted standards for HTML and CSS is not only factually incorrect -- it's irresponsible. Learning to write correct and compliant HTML and CSS isn't just smart; it's crucial for the roughly 10% of web users who are disabled and require some assistive technology to access web content. Poorly-designed and implemented web content becomes completely useless to this large segment of your potential audience. There are a very few good things beginners can pick up from this book, but they could get the same and then some from other comparably-priced books. Poor premise, poor attitude toward delivery, and poor comparison to other books make this a book I just can't recommend.
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