Small Web Sites, Great Results

by Doug Addison

""Small Web Sites, Great Results"" promises to be the definitive book on the new movement of Web site design and creation that is sweeping the Internet, much in the same way ""Looking Good in Print"" became the classic on desktop publishing. The authors provide a treasure chest of insight, ideas, and design how-tos about how to make Web sites really work for a majority of small businesses and individuals who can benefit from a Web presence.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1932111905
• ISBN13: 9781932111903
• Release Date: November 2004
• Publisher: Paraglyph Press
• Length: 279 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 8.1" x 9.9"

Customer Reviews

A "Must-Have" Book for Anyone with a Website

This book will help anyone at any stage of the website endeavor; it demystefies the process of setting up a effective site, and it offers suggestions for making existing sites more user-friendly. As a professional person in a non-technical field, I found this book to be very helpful in making decisions about how to structure my website. This book convinced me that "less is more" and taught me how to make key design decisions to increase traffic. "Great Results" - indeed!

Great book, great advice and direction

I'm not a graphic designer nor an artist - I'm just a guy who wants to build a nice-looking family web site. I am, however, a software developer, and as a developer, I find it tempting to do things "just because I can". This book gives me the well-deserved smack upside the head when I get excited about some cool (and usually pointless or gaudy) new CSS or JavaScript effect. The book first discusses elements that make a small web site great - i.e. simplicity, context, and organization. It then moves on to explaining how to create the proper focus and discusses proper use of color, images and navigation. There are also sections on marketing, selecting a web designer (if you don't want to do-it-yourself), and what to do when you need a "big" web site. The end of the book is devoted to developing web sites for professional services, trade services, specialty services, artists, writers and performers, and restaurants. These provide plenty of variety and suggestions you can take and apply to your own small web site. Plenty of common sense and direction. If you are looking for a set of guidelines for creating a quality small web site, this book fits the bill.

A Good, Practical Guide

It's easy to lose sight of the basic needs of the user when building a website, but if you're smart enough to read this book and enlist its theories in your plan, you'll end up with a useful, intuitive, and profitable site. The text is direct in its message and is easy for inexperienced web designers to understand. Screen shots clearly illustrate good and bad examples. Thank you, Mr. Addison, for showing us that bigger is not better.

Clear, concise, timely

Doug Addison's thesis here is that many, if not most, websites are too cumbersome to fulfill the needs of the average Internet user, and that frustrating your potential customers is no way to get their business. His clear recommendations for improvement are sensible and timely; one doesn't have to look very hard to find examples of "bloated" websites with their aggravating redirects and obscure pathways. Addison has practiced what he preaches in this text: he doesn't muddy the water with redundant prose or needlessly technical jargon, so even a neophyte like myself can easily navigate the often complex world of modern web design. This is required reading for anyone interested in their first website, and it should be required for any experienced web designer who thinks that bigger is always better. Some of the graphics are a little small, but Addison's decision to use real web pages to illustrate the good, the bad, and the ugly of the Internet provides the reader with up-to-date, concrete examples that augment his text rather than simply decorate it. A very useful and enlightening guide.

Great for startups and other small businesses

I teach management and entrepreneurship and will now reference this book. After some chapters about the right viewpoint it gets to the heart of how to make a website work for a business -- rare stuff indeed. All of the chapters provide real, practical information, and the final chapters (the ones for particular businesses) are useful for everyone since they provide examples of how to think about your site. Great book, packed with good advice, and easy to follow. My only complaint is that the images of websites (providing examples of both good and bad practice) could have been larger. But since you can go to the website itself, this is not a real problem.