The Story

Smashing Magazine is, imo, one of the best online magazines for web designers and developers. They have awesome articles, inspirational gallery posts, showcase great fonts and icons, and are just generally all-around useful and a fabulous resource. I’m subscribed to the RSS feed, and I go through the older posts on an almost daily basis for help with what I’m working on at that point in time.

The authors of Smashing Magazine decided (with the help of their readers) to put together a more in-depth book covering some of the big topics for successful websites. The book covers topics that anyone who is even remotely involved with website creation would find useful. The book covers user interface design, basic CSS layouts, typography, usability, colour, optimization, conversion rates and branding. It also has interviews with some of the better known web people, and the story behind Smashing Magazine.

The Review

First, the good: this book does go in depth into these topics. It’s not just some brief overview or a couple of pointers for great websites. It explains what things mean and why you should do things certain ways – for example, it explains that you don’t want to open links in new windows because it takes control away from the user, it makes the website operate in a way that they don’t expect, and it can basically make a user unhappy. And an unhappy user is a user who doesn’t stick around on your website. (I so want to lend this book to an old boss just for that chapter, as he has a bit of a penchant for opening every single link in a new window.)

Another good thing is that there are a lot of images involved to illustrate what they are talking about – especially helpful for the chapters on colour, conversion rates and branding. It’s especially nice that the images were high quality and that they were printed in colour &ndash not all books would do this, as it can be more expensive for printing, but it was definitely highly appreciated.

A fair amount of information I have read before, but it was a good refresher. And there were some things that I have marked off that I have already started putting into practice on my work’s website.

Now for the not-so-good: because the book was written by so many people it didn’t read all the same. Which wasn’t bad for a lot of it, but when there are multiple authors for certain chapters, and each section of the chapters read differently, it was a little distracting. For example, in the usability chapter the section on web forms gives stats on what is used how often, but the section on dropdown menus gave examples of why each option is good or bad. I would’ve liked to hear pros and cons for forms, or stats for dropdown menus, as well, just to keep it consistent.

The other not-so-good thing was that, while it’s awesome there were so many images, the images weren’t always near the text that was talking about it. In the chapter about branding, there were a number of times when the screencaps of websites described were a whole double page spread away from the text about it. Or, if the images couldn’t be closer, a URL to the website that was being spoken about would have been most helpful.

The Bottom Line

This book isn’t necessarily a must-have for web developers and designers – the majority, if not all, of the content covered in the book can be found online. That said, even if you’ve read the content before, it definitely is a good refresher, and there are parts that would come in handy if you prefer to get your info from a quick flip through to the right chapter as opposed to searching on the internet for what you’re looking for. Would recommend it as a read to those who are involved with creating websites – whether it’s the front end or the back end.

Other Reviews

Have you reviewed this book on your blog? Let me know and I’ll add your link.