Although Dreamweaver, GoLive, Photoshop, and other applications are mentioned (Flash even gets its own chapter), the book covers the gamut of Web design and technology issues rather than focusing on an individual application.

Each chapter is divided into sections, often no more than a couple of pages long. The chapter on Backgrounds, the area of a Web page that seems to attract the worst design crimes, shows you how to avoid "the heartbreak of bad background design" in no less than eight sections.

In many books this subject would be lucky to get eight paragraphs, Robin Williams Web Design Workshop uses a clear two-column layout and plenty of real-life example screenshots to get the message across. Some pages consist only of captioned screenshots providing a great source of visual ideas.

There's a good balance between purely design-related issues and the technical stuff. Subjects like search engines, embedded fonts, DHTML and forms are given a thorough overview highlighting the main issues, and links to sources of more in-depth information are often to be found at the end of the chapter.

If see yourself more as a designer than a programmer, but want a working knowledge of current Web technologies from a book that you can read away from your computer, this is it. --Ken McMahon

Product Description

With Robin Williams' guiding hand, non-professionals, artists, and designers alike have learned the principles behind elegant design. Now that much of this same audience is working on the Web, Robin has focused her attention on the specific needs of this medium with Robin Williams Web Design Workshop. John Tollett and Dave Rohr pitch in with their illustration and graphics experience to create a handsome and engaging instructional book. The ideas in this book tackle all aspects of Web design theory, including all the ways that color, fonts, clip art, photographs and so on contribute to creating a visual impression. Then the book takes the user through site planning and layout, navigability, and functionality, all in Robin Williams' clear and accessible style.