250 HTML and Web Design Secrets is the latest and greatest from Molly Holzschlag. It is a quick, easy and enjoyable read. If you're a web designer or web developer this book definitely needs to be among your references. The book is packed with tips on a wide range of subjects. Don't be ashamed of having on your desk a book that has HTML in its title. There's much more to it. If you learned HTML or CSS via View Source or feel you have gaps in your knowledge this is your book.
To truly reflect the content of this book its title should say 250 HTML and Web Design Tips because this is what it offers. Overall, I think of this book as a road sign: if gives you enough direction to research on your own. Almost every tip provides a link or two to online resources to get you going.
The book is divided up in three parts:
- Tools, Planning, and Content
- HTML, XHTML, CSS and Accessibility
- Designing Sites With Long Term Success
Part I: Tools, Planning, and Content
This section is helpful to those new to management of web design projects and information architecture. It doesn't bore you with a lot theory, but merely scratches the surface. If you want to learn web design project management from A to Z go get Web ReDesign : Workflow that Works and The Design of Sites.
Part II: HTML, XHTML, CSS and Accessibility
This is the really fun part. The chapters cover conformance issues, structuring documents, appropriate use of a number of HTML elements, colors, typography, validation. You will learn what XHTML is, how different (or similar) it is from HTML and how you go about authoring XHTML pages. You will also see how to style lists to create navigation menus, how to produce CSS-based mouse-overs and so on.
There's an entire chapter, Laying Out Pages with CSS, that teaches you floats, CSS hacks and their use strategies, alternate stylesheets, 2- and 3-columns layouts, and concludes with CSS best practices.
Part III: Designing Sites With Long Term Success
The final part of the book deals with such issues as keeping the content fresh and appealing; when to redesign; how to better position the site in search engines and conduct online marketing campaigns.
Resume
If you are a regular visitor to web logs of folks like Doug Bowman, Andy Budd (don't let moomins scare you), Dan Cederholm and Dave Shea you already know half of this book. Numerous links point to their blogs. Nevertheless, quite a few things will be new to you (or a refresher). The book is fun, and Molly's ideas are expressed in plain and clear language.
There were a couple of things I didn't quite like about 250 Secrets. First, there a lot of screenshots of browsers that take half a page and display only one line of text. Seems like an awful waste of paper. Or is it because "white space is groovy"? Second, the quality of paper... well... reminds of Charmin. :) Hey, use the book appropriately! I think this one goes to the publishers, though. And the last one—why use document.write with XHTML? It defies the purpose of its XML nature.
