Learning CSS technology and continually improving one?s design and developer skills is essential for every Web designer. Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates (CSS and XHTML), Third Edition educates beginning-to-intermediate Web designers on crucial design issues through general discussion, case studies, and helpful tips and techniques. Using easy-to-understand language and concepts, the book bridges the knowledge gap from XHTML table-based design to full CSS-based design, helping you master the most current technologies and techniques needed. With over 13 years of experience as a Web designer for Fortune 500 companies, non-profi ts, and small businesses alike, author Clint Eccher has learned numerous tips and techniques of the trade and discloses them here, saving you time and potential aggravation by alerting you to potential pitfalls. Best of all, he shares over 200 of the completely customizable design templates that he has developed over the years on this book?s companion CD-ROM! The designs included on the CD illustrate the book?s content and offer you a variety of options?XHTML table-based coded Web sites, e-newsletters, signatures, Photoshop-only designs, and CSS-coded designs. These designs not only offer the reader a variety of designs that can be quickly customized and used, but are great for inspiration as well. This is a complete Web design training course and free library of templates all in one!

Clint Eccher has designed professional Web sites for seven years and now makes some of his designs available as templates through his own site (A5design.com) and with his new book, Professional Web Design. You get 50 templates (each of which features home and second-level pages) and careful instructions on how to adapt them for your own use. Along the way, Eccher offers sound advice on good Web design practices; a little bit about HTML, cascading style sheets, and JavaScript; a look at JPEGs and GIFs; and some insight into "comping" (sketching) a site design for the client’s approval.

For the most part, however, this book addresses just those aspects of Web design that readers will need to know in order to successfully utilize the templates. These are designed as "mortised" sites; that is, they are built with nested tables and sliced GIF/JPEG combinations, the kind of design made easy with the advent of Adobe’s ImageReady and Macromedia’s Fireworks. Although this is not a how-to about using those applications or about creating such sites from scratch, Eccher does help readers learn how to debug and otherwise adjust the source code in order to successfully implement the designs. In addition to trial versions of the major applications, the CD-ROM also contains the JavaScript Cookbook and HTML/CSS Developer’s Resource Guide, which provide lots of cut-and-paste source code for all kinds of features (games, sounds, pop-up messages) that can be added to a Web page.

One caveat: despite the templates, this book is too detailed for beginners. For those with some experience, and especially for developers who lack design skills and like the A5design style, this book amounts to an intensive Clint Eccher brain-picking seminar. He offers a few tricks that can be applied to any design (like his tips on how to drastically reduce file sizes) and some good general advice (for example, "Do not get attached to the work" because a client may just decide against it). --Angelynn Grant

Whether you are an intermediate Web designer looking to take your sites to the next level or a more experienced designer looking to improve your professional skills, you will find the tools to meet your needs in Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates, Second Edition. This completely updated version of the best-selling book features the 50 professional-quality, license-free Web design templates from the original, as well as 15 new templates, all of which can be easily customized and extended. Each ready-to-use design includes a homepage, and one second-level page, and the framework to build subsequent pages. All of the specific techniques that are required for building these and other highly usable sites have been updated to cover the latest technologies, including HTML, XHTML, JavaScript, CSS, Photoshop CS, and PHP. Also included are five new HTML e-mail templates, an increasingly important marketing tool. Detailed tutorials and hands-on projects teach both basic and sophisticated design concepts, including how to create designs for low, medium, or high content sites and the strengths and weaknesses of each. The new edition also includes four new chapters on Cascading Style Sheets, using client-side scripting, creating dynamic sites, and an overview of the new Web designs. It covers important topics such as client- and server-side scripting, security, and using databases to update a site’s content.

KEY FEATURES * Covers the entire design process, from gathering requirements and creating a comp, to enhancing usability, designing for scalability, developing architecture, and simplifying navigation * Explains technical and aesthetic graphics issues, from when to use GIF or JPEG images to which design will best suit your content * Teaches you how to upload your site to a server and test for compatibility with Web browsers

On The CD-ROM * EXAMPLES - Includes all of the samples from the book * SOFTWARE - Includes an Open Source Web server package (containing Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl), trial versions of Adobe Photoshop CS and Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004, and JavaScript CD Cookbook 3rd Edition and The HTML/CSS Developer’s Resource Guide software * WEB SITE TEMPLATES - Provides the 50 license-free, ready-to-use templates from the original edition, 15 new templates, and 5 HTML e-mail templates

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS PC: 600 MHz Intel Pentium III processor or equivalent; Windows 98 SE (4.10.2222 A), Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003; 192MB RAM (256 MB recommended); 280MB available disk space; Color monitor with 16-bit color or greater video card; 1024x768 or greater monitor resolution; CD-ROM drive; MAC: Mac OS X 10.2.6 and later, 10.3; 500 MHz Power PC G3 processor; 192MB computer RAM (256MB recommended); 320MB available disk space; Color monitor with 16-bit color or greater video card; 1024x768 or greater monitor resolution; CD-ROM drive

Bad designs and templates
I purchased this book because I thought the templates could be useful. I already have a pile of books on CSS and Web Development, but the templates made this book stick out.

The templates and designs that come with the CD are laughably bad. I can not imagine a single instance where a professional would ever consider using a template from this book.
If you dig really hard through the templates (several hundred) you might find a couple that could be useful. Other than that they are defintely good for a chuckle.

Not for everyone
The title is misleading; it is not a professional approach to web page design because it relies on tables for page style. Using tables for design was deprecated by W3C when they developed CSS. A professional, "web standards" page uses CSS for layout and design. Tables are used to make TABLES.

This style of design makes it VERY difficult to change or modify a web page later. This is not something professional designers are willing to accept. Tables are easy to learn and this style of web page design is suitable for someone (with some knowledge of HTML) who wants to make their own site.

It will help you make a good looking site, save you money and get you up and running faster than you could otherwise. But there is a price to pay for that. It will give you grief if you decide to make significant design changes or want to hire someone to change it for you (they will charge you an arm and a leg to do it).

If you might want to design sites for extra money later on, you must make a serious effort to learn CSS. This is not an easy task but has significant rewards.

Over ten years ago, W3C realized that HTML had serious limitations and they developed CSS to solve the problem. CSS divides web page design into two parts. HTML deals with the content (the writing, images and stuff like that). CSS deals with design and style (what the stuff looks like, where it goes on the page, color and things like that).

The two are VERY different and when you use TABLES as a substitute for CSS, you are creating major problems for those who follow in your footsteps (including you). I hope this makes things clear and helps you decide if this book is for you.

One last thing. There are a huge number of resources, free, on the web to help learn CSS web page design. Just do a search for ’web page css: (design - tutorials - templates). Do a search and learn a little about CSS design to see what you want to do before you decide to buy this. Good luck. Designing web sites is fun, if you have gobs of patience and a very low frustration level.

Great book
This book was well written. Even though I have been a graphic web designer for several years, I still have some knowledge that I don’t know. I am happy to read new thoughts and study new technology from this book.

Pick out the good advice, leave the poor advice alone.
This book has a handful of useful things to say regarding the use of graphics, planning as well as a plethora of ready-made web site templates. It is also spotted through with handy advice and clear writing as well as good examples and discussion. There is a huge "if" though.

The book has become clearly dated in regards to current web site design practice. This book uses tables for layout and to be honest, xhtml/css is the industry preferred method separating content (provided by html/xhtml) from presentation (CSS). As such, I think those looking for a complete and professional introduction and presentation of current (mid-2007) methodologies would be better served by the following suite of books:

Usability Issues
- Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition by Steve Krug

Clear Presentation and Introduction to XHTML and CSS
- HTML Dog: The Best-Practice Guide to XHTML and CSS by Patrick Griffiths

Advanced CSS Design
- CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions by Andy Budd, Simon Collison, and Cameron Moll

Different Designs demonstrating what can be achieved using CSS
- The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web (Voices That Matter) by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag

While there are other great books about current best practice, these are the ones that I believe best encapsulate what "Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates" tries to do. I think a 3rd edition of this book is needed to truly update it to current practice.

Not-so-professional Web design
The title of this book should be "Professional LOOKING Web Design." The numerous template sites provided look great, and are useful for running by clients and asking "which of these do you like?" However, under the hood, the implementation of these pages is anything but professional, at least not by modern standards of using CSS for layout, and tables only for content that is truly tabular.

Instead, the templates rely heavily on tables, and tables within tables, for dividing up the layout of the pages. This can make it hard to customize them (particularly all the chopped-up graphics), and gives you a headache when trying to figure out which cell-inside-a-cell you’re editing. This is exacerbated by the poor layout of the HTML code, with tag pairs that don’t line up, indents that don’t reflect the document structure, and so on.

CSS is mostly relegated to providing styling for text. On page 42 of the 2nd edition, the author does briefly address the table-v-CSS issue, and concludes that CSS is more difficult than using tables (I’d disagree) and that not all browsers support CSS exactly the same way (true enough for some features, but in general a small amount of tweaking and testing will let your designs work in all major browsers).

There are some useful tips and tricks in this book, and the templates do provide some great *ideas* for design and layout, but not good *implementations*. When you come to designing your own pages, the best approach is throw out the book’s HTML and CSS and start from scratch. Because this book is most likely to be used by beginning developers, it’s unfortunate that it provides so many inadvisable lessons in implementing its templates.

Right now I don’t have a good modern (CSS) design book in my library to recommend - I’ve found that many great resources are available on the Web, such as w3.org and the CSS Zen Garden.

Worthwile for any web developer
This book gives some good insights into web design, and is worth reading by any web developer no matter how experienced.

Great for learning certain techniques
So, I’m not sure all of the templates are the greatest I’ve ever seen, but they’re really good. If they were better, you’d be buying them or creating them yourself. I think this book is really good at helping understand that given all the ways I could build a website and given the current trends and methods, why to choose what they recommend. I’ve been doing web design profesionnaly for over six years and I am glad I got this book.

Nice Job
I needed this book for a class, and I found it very helpful. The overall organization was good, with helpful details.

Loads of help
As a relatively inexperienced person drafted to build a web site, I found this book a well-spring of help and ideas. I HIGHLY recommend it but have a few points that could be addressed in future versions.
1- Very numerous, unimportant but distracting typos/errors such as ’than’ in the place of ’that.’ Some seriously tedious editing attention should be applied to correct these irksome glitches.
2- Constant referral to color such as ’green block’ where the graphic is grayscale. Either use color graphics or stop using color as the descriptor.
3- Representation of the egregiously non-standard IE as the closest to standard. Standards are determined by standards agencies such as W3C, not by market penetration.
4- Outdated evaluations of browser share and the absence of FireFox in the discussion.
Items 3 and 4 are undoubtedly due to the 2004 publication date but #4 is an issue impacting usefulness.

Leaves something to be desired
As a Web professional, I’m always interested in reviewing the work of my peers, seeing what I can learn from them. I visited the author’s Web site and perused his portfolio since a look inside the book wasn’t available here, and I was more than a little disappointed. The integration of his CSS/XHTML is flawed and it just doesn’t display the way it should on the major operating system/browser combinations that it should. With this in mind, any advice from the doesn’t hold much water for me. I was most interested in this book as a source of inspiration, and have found the Taschen series much more to my liking.

useful book - good "jumping off point"
I was particularly interested in the templates found on the CD-ROM. As others have noted, these designs are created with nested tables. The art is created in Photoshop. Having "picked" at a couple of templates, I’m now seeing where the various images are and how to manipulate them. I wish, however, that the authors had used layers rather than templates. I’m finding that the best way (for me) to utilize these templates is as a basis for a new design by starting with a blank HTML page and replacing the tables and with layers.

Useful and up-to-date content
Web technology evolves so much in these years. This book introduces various kind s of modern web design and development and the essential points during the process. The enriched and useful contents are benifitial to the design and development on any state.

Missing CD
I ordered this book and when I got it, it came without the CD.

The Sales Receipt stated that it sent me a book with a Missing/Broken CD. The title of the reciet: "Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates (with CD-ROM) (Internet...). Why would they send me a book without the CD when I ordered it with a CD? The Title even states that I ordered one with a CD.

Without the CD, most of the book is useless. I will never order books from Amazon again.

Good starting place for novice web design enthusiasts.
I am by no means an accomplished web designer. I further am an incompetent when it comes to the graphic arts.

I thus have purchased several books to get my commercial web site up and running - LJ’s Breaking Free$ To get you free and kiss wage-slaving goodbye - Your link to independence.

The templates are a great help. Hey, in this case I bought the book especially for the templates.

I think you’ll find the case studies almost as useful as the templates. After all, there is little so helpful as a direct example.

Here’s to all you budding web designers!

Good Introduction to Mortised Site Design
As the title says, this is a book on the design of web pages. It is focused on producing designs that reflect many of the modern trends in web design thought. There was a time a few years back when the web sites of all the major companies used Macromedia Flash to animate, that is create movement, on their home pages. For instance, the authors report, quite accurately I think, that such animation has not proven suitable for the majority of web sites. Like Microsoft’s "clippy" paper clip "help" thing that used to appear at the bottom of Word/Esce./Etc. a lot of people really don’t like moving things.

These authors really like mortised sites. This design philosophy uses tables within tables within tables to provide the view the authors are trying to create. The designs they give in their fifty included templates are of the mortised type. The trouble with mortised sites is that you have to receive all of the information for the site before the browser can begin drawing the tables on the screen. With todays fast processors, this is not usually a problem. But they can get dreadfully slow if you are accessing them over a slow line, especially if they include a lot of graphical images.

The back of the book says this is for Beginner to Intermediate. This does not mean the Front Page level beginner. You’d best have some idea about HTML before you start this one. I’d say it’s an intermediate level book, which is reflected in the wording on the back page.

This book deserves seven stars !
No book is ever perfect but some books are sure close and this happens to be one of them. This book teaches mortising which is break up sites in smaller chunks for faster downloads. I really appreciate the part about slicing that went a step further to say which slices to be saved in Gif or Jpeg and the rational. Mr. Eccher please be a little more lucid with some of your explanations and it would be nice to show alternatives, for example masking.

Yes this book focuses on photoshop but if you know how paint shop pro some of the design techiques should be lucrative.

Visually stunning but...
All the designs are heavily mortised, require a LOT of nested tables, and are mainly geared toward content-heavy sites with extensive menus. (For those of us who think that paying hundreds of dollars of Photoshop is ridiculous when Paint Shop Pro does the same for 1/6 the cost, be warned the templates are Photoshop-centric.)

As someone already said, these are visually stunning examples, but very tables-intensive which can be time-consuming to edit/code and may be problematic for impaired site visitors who rely on web-reading technology. For the dozen or so examples (and their variations), decide for yourself if inspiration is worth the cost.