By: Molly E. Holzschlag
Publisher: Addison Wesley Professional
ISBN: 0-13-185586-7


The fastest route to true HTML/CSS mastery!

Need to build a web site? Or update one? Or just create some effective new web content? Maybe you just need to update your skills, do the job better.

Welcome. This book's for you. We'll leverage what you already know about the web, so you'll go further, faster than you ever expected. You'll master today's best practices: the real nuts and bolts, not theory or hooey. You'll learn through dozens of focused HTML, XHTML, and CSS examples: crafted for simplicity and easy to adapt for your own projects.

Need specific solutions? This book's modular, visual, high-efficiency format delivers them instantly. Molly E. Holzschlag draws on her unparalleled experience teaching Web design and development. No other HTML/CSS guide covers this much, this well, this quickly. Dig in, get started, get results!

- All you need to succeed with HTML, XHTML, and CSS in real-world projects
- Learn how to build web pages that'll work in any environment, on virtually any contemporary browser
- Construct templates that simplify every page you develop
- Structure and tag text so it's easy to work with and manage
- Add images, media, and scripts——quickly and reliably
- Discover the right ways to use HTML tables
- Build easy-to-use forms and validate your users' input
- Use CSS to take total control over your site's look and feel
- Master core CSS techniques: color, images, text styles, link effects, lists, navigation, and more
- Control margins, borders, padding, positioning, floats, even Z-index
- Design efficient, compatible, easy-to-manage CSS layouts

Includes concise XHTML and CSS annotated references: quick help for every language element.

Designing Interfaces captures those best practices as design patterns -- solutions to common design problems, tailored to the situation at hand. Each pattern contains practical advice that you can put to use immediately, plus a variety of examples illustrated in full color. You'll get recommendations, design alternatives, and warnings on when not to use them.

Each chapter's introduction describes key design concepts that are often misunderstood, such as affordances, visual hierarchy, navigational distance, and the use of color. These give you a deeper understanding of why the patterns work, and how to apply them with more insight.

A book can't design an interface for you -- no foolproof design process is given here -- but Designing Interfaces does give you concrete ideas that you can mix and recombine as you see fit. Experienced designers can use it as a sourcebook of ideas. Novice designers will find a roadmap to the world of interface and interaction design, with enough guidance to start using these patterns immediately.

Think you have to be a technical wizard to build a great web site? Think again. For anyone who wants to create an engaging web site--for either personal or business purposes--Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual demystifies the process and provides tools, techniques, and expert guidance for developing a professional and reliable web presence.

Like every Missing Manual, you can count on Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual to be entertaining and insightful and complete with all the vital information, clear-headed advice, and detailed instructions you need to master the task at hand. Author Matthew MacDonald teaches you the fundamentals of creating, maintaining, and updating an effective, attractive, and visitor-friendly web site--from scratch or from an existing site that's a little too simple or flat for your liking.

Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual doesn't only cover how to create a well-designed, appealing, smart web site that is thoroughly up to date and brimming with the latest features. It also covers why it's worth the effort by explaining the rationale for creating a site in the first place and discussing what makes a given web site particularly aesthetic, dynamic, and powerful. It further helps you determine your needs and goals and make well informed design and content decisions.