Small Websites, Great Results

Rating:
Summary: Clear, concise, timely
Review: Doug Addison's thesis here is that many, if not most, websites are too cumbersome to fulfill the needs of the average Internet user, and that frustrating your potential customers is no way to get their business. His clear recommendations for improvement are sensible and timely; one doesn't have to look very hard to find examples of "bloated" websites with their aggravating redirects and obscure pathways. Addison has practiced what he preaches in this text: he doesn't muddy the water with redundant prose or needlessly technical jargon, so even a neophyte like myself can easily navigate the often complex world of modern web design. This is required reading for anyone interested in their first website, and it should be required for any experienced web designer who thinks that bigger is always better. Some of the graphics are a little small, but Addison's decision to use real web pages to illustrate the good, the bad, and the ugly of the Internet provides the reader with up-to-date, concrete examples that augment his text rather than simply decorate it. A very useful and enlightening guide.

Rating:
Summary: good for graphics designers
Review: Addison is directing his book to a person, possibly of a nontechnical background, responsible for designing a website. The emphasis here is on a clean, simple design. The book gives a top-down approach. It helps you with the design and deliberately eshews discussing the programming aspects of how to implement it. That is the remit of other books. Put it this way. There is only one explicit mention of HTML tags in the entire book. Leave most of that stuff to the programmers. Instead, Addison spends much attention on showing a good website focus that a reader will quickly understand.

Also, that one instance of an HTML tag refers to the META tag. It does not affect the visible aspect of a page. But you need to craft this to help search engines classify your pages for maximum exposure to queries. Important for any website.

So without knowing HTML, you can still get a practical understanding of what can be designed with it. Hence, the book might appeal to you, if your strength is in graphics design, and not coding.


Rating:
Summary: Valuable Advice on Rethinking a Current Website
Review: Doug Addison provides a real service with this book because he has made it useful not only for people thinking about their first website but also for those of us who already have a website and wonder how to make it better. To think small instead of large...a new way for me to think. To ask myself what is the focus of my website...very useful challenge. To determine how much of what I have do I really want and need...a promising conversation to have with myself. I am now looking at my website in a new way and suspect that the future revision I and my web designer will be doing will contain in some way the basic messages of this excellent book.

Rating:
Summary: Great contrarian advice
Review: I liked just about everything in this book, but particularly the contrarian advice. I've been telling clients for years that bigger isn't better, that you really should stage out projects instead of going for moonshoots, that they really should avoid the long death marches that wear everyone out and waste money. Now all I have to do is give them Doug's book.

Rating:
Summary: Great for startups and other small businesses
Review: I teach management and entrepreneurship and will now reference this book. After some chapters about the right viewpoint it gets to the heart of how to make a website work for a business -- rare stuff indeed. All of the chapters provide real, practical information, and the final chapters (the ones for particular businesses) are useful for everyone since they provide examples of how to think about your site. Great book, packed with good advice, and easy to follow.

My only complaint is that the images of websites (providing examples of both good and bad practice) could have been larger. But since you can go to the website itself, this is not a real problem.

Rating:
Summary: Great book, great advice and direction
Review: I'm not a graphic designer nor an artist - I'm just a guy who wants to build a nice-looking family web site. I am, however, a software developer, and as a developer, I find it tempting to do things "just because I can". This book gives me the well-deserved smack upside the head when I get excited about some cool (and usually pointless or gaudy) new CSS or JavaScript effect.

The book first discusses elements that make a small web site great - i.e. simplicity, context, and organization. It then moves on to explaining how to create the proper focus and discusses proper use of color, images and navigation. There are also sections on marketing, selecting a web designer (if you don't want to do-it-yourself), and what to do when you need a "big" web site.

The end of the book is devoted to developing web sites for professional services, trade services, specialty services, artists, writers and performers, and restaurants. These provide plenty of variety and suggestions you can take and apply to your own small web site.

Plenty of common sense and direction. If you are looking for a set of guidelines for creating a quality small web site, this book fits the bill.

Rating:
Summary: A Good, Practical Guide
Review: It's easy to lose sight of the basic needs of the user when building a website, but if you're smart enough to read this book and enlist its theories in your plan, you'll end up with a useful, intuitive, and profitable site. The text is direct in its message and is easy for inexperienced web designers to understand. Screen shots clearly illustrate good and bad examples. Thank you, Mr. Addison, for showing us that bigger is not better.

Rating:
Summary: Creating effective sites
Review: The plus sides of this book is that it shows people that bigger is not always better, incorporating all the bells and whistles is not always productive in creating an effective web site and finally a web site should be about the users and not the designers or business.

I have a number of years in the web development arena and I have read a LOT of books on the subject. Doug's book is very refreshing for the simple fact that there are not a lot of books of this type of information available today. From the beginning of the book, he gives you clear cut information and examples of his thoughts on web site bloat and how to prevent it. As the book progresses, he then starts showing how to develope the "plan" of creating a lean and mean site and avoiding bloat. Thus improving customer relationships and turning visitors into customers.

My only complaints about the book are the images for the web site examples were a bit small and really relied on you visiting the site to view and compare. What happens if the site updates their site!! :)

It is a great book for people thinking about getting their business a web presence and doing it with the least amount of headache and the max amount of information. Plus seasoned web designers/developers can learn a thing or two as well about keeping sites geared more towards customers and users than themselves etc.