Rating: 
Summary: The definitive guide to home page design
Review: The value of this book comes from the sheer volume of insight it contains: Jakob and Marie leave no stone unturned listing all the things that make for well-designed home pages.A few downsides:
- The home page reviews are comprehensive, but the "problems" the authors find get somewhat repetitive after a while. In fact, after reading through about 20 reviews I was able to find more than half of the "problems" before reading the review (simply by looking at the screnshots).
- Another thing the authors could have done to make the reviews more useful: separate serious problems from trivial ones instead of listing them all in a single list. Conclusion:
While the book does have its quirks, it is a solid reference overall and will make a great addition to any web designer's library.
Rating: 
Summary: It works, read my proof
Review: To the reviewer, "A reader from Columbus, Ohio" who wants his money back; maybe you should read it again; it does mention that a small site does not require a search feature (long as it is easily navigated). I have implemented changes mentioned in this book, on my site, and have seen dramatic increases in traffic and business. The professional advice for this price is a steal, moreover, the book is beautiful and has recently won has won the Independent Publisher Book Award 2002 for best book of the year in the "computer/Internet" category.
Rating: 
Summary: If you have too much money, get rid of some by buying this.
Review: I'm stunned that any reader would give this book 5 stars.
It is filled with obvious and uninsightful nitpicks of popular entry pages (not websites, which is where actual usability comes into play).
His capricious evaluation tactics include measuring the percentage of pixels allocated to things like "white space", "self promotional" and "filler" (he does not inform the reader his distinction between such categories. Nor does he indicate what magical percentage he finds appropriate). Anyone looking for usability insight from Nielsen need only look at his mundane website (useit.com) to see the lackluster consequences of following Nielsen's advice (it's also worth a look since much of the 'information' in this book can be had there for free).
Rating:
Summary: Superb, well written and illustrated
Review: I went to the local bookstore scanning for flash books, found this gem and picked it up instead (at full price aagh should've ordered here sigh) .. What's good:
Excellent full color pages with carefully written, detailed pros and cons of 50 various homepages. How it's better than other usability texts:
I scanned through 12 others, they were all in plain text, not engaging, and not much in the way of examples. This book is superb, has a lot to learn from, even for a veteran web designer like myself. I'm sure the reviews will help me improve my sites' designs and clarity. Nice work, a webmaster "must have" .. imho.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: This book really shows what it takes to have an easily browsable site. It takes 50 sites and breaks them down into what they did right and wrong. The book also gives guidelines on what every site should follow to kinda give a standard on the web. Also, they have done their research to show us what works and doesn't which is a big plus. In short, great book...get it.
Rating:
Summary: I Want My Money Back !
Review: In spite of the attractive cover and being publiehsed by New Riders, this book is a great disappointment. My advice for any current webdesigner is to look elsewhere for ideas. The first 33 pages of this book contain advice that seems more appropriate for a text book on writing, such as using standard capitalization, spelling out the name of a month and using standard abbreviations. The next section of the book describes statistics collected by the authors. Here, the statistics are presented in a way that strongly encourages primarily cookie-cutter websites. For example, the authors found that 84% of the websites they looked at had the company logo in the upper-left corner of the homepage. And follow this finding with "We recommend that your site include a logo on the homepage placed in the upper-left corner." As another example it criticizes sites (and even excludes them from their analysis) that do not offer a search feature. With statements such as "Unbelieveably, 14% of the homepages didn't have a search feature." seems to make no allowance for small sites where a search feature would be unnecessary and even foolish. The final section of the book provides full-color screen shots of popular website homepages and an analysis of those pages by the authors. Here, the authors "critique" pages with frequent trivial comments that seem more appropriate to a scolding teacher or parent with comments like "There should be..." or "This is odd..." or "It's never good.." I really enjoy good web design books and frequently recommend them to other designers and even clients. But I could not recommend this book even to a novice.
Rating: 
Summary: Unusable Usability
Review: This book contains a bit of practical information on usability but the deconstructions are excessive and narrow minded. Nielsen's opinions seem entirely subjective as well as rigid when he dismisses elements on pages that are useful and popular (such as amazon.com's much used Friends and Favorites) as being frivolous and useless. I get the impression from reading Nielsen's advice that community, interactivity, visual appeal, fun, and anything else that is not 100% utilitarian and "down to business" is unacceptable. A Nielsen approved home page must fit a cookie cutter template that he has decided makes it as efficient as possible. This advice in this book consistently ignores the purpose of the "illegal" design or interactive element. The idea here is to stick to a basic template and make the content fit those specifications, even if those elements are working and serve a purpose. Otherwise, you are detracting from the home page's purpose and usability. This makes no sense. It is possible and preferable to create a visually interesting home page complete with clever innovative content, catch phrases, or interactive features that is perfectly useable and certainly more enjoyable.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent resource for a narrow topic
Review: Nielsen delivers exactly what he promises in this book; lots of pithy criticisms on a very narrow topic - company homepages. I see the same problems all the time; they aren't going away and neither is Nielsen. The book is well-focused and usable. I understand the comments of reviewers who feel like Nielsen trashes everything that is creative. However, usability is the single-minded pursuit of ease-of-use; graphic artists DO get "too" creative and marketers DO get carried away - and ordinary users DO leave websites that are too difficult to use!
Rating: 
Summary: These people have no sense of design
Review: All they did was totally rip every site to shreds. Sure they had good comments on these sites. But their comments overall never took a sense of design into consideration. They bashed every tagline; requesting one that "describes the purpose of the site" is a better tagline. Hello??? Ever heard of marketing/advertising? Tag lines don't work this way. They are catchy and functional. While this book gave me a good overalls sense of what a good homepage looks like, I was highly irritated and annoyed by these two authors' comments. If you listen to them, your site will be so boring and bland. Everything creative to them was useless.
Rating:
Summary: Stifling
Review: At first I thought this book would be inspiring and informative. Although some of the statistical data was useful, overall I found this book to be stifling. As a student of web design, I found it bothersome how the authors stamped out every notion of creativity. They insult the intelligence of present-day internet users and suggest an almost "template" approach to web design. As they deconstructed sites, I found their suggestions to be petty and/or picky. For example, they suggest that every page should place the logo in the upperleft corner. Or, they would criticize wording for being "overly cutesy" or "too clever."
Although I think it is important for webpages to have worthy content and logical navigation, the authors of this book regard visual appeal as something frivilous. I would challenge that the viewing public do in fact have a large visual vocabulary and are capable of consuming and understanding different visual forms. We see this in the areas of advertising and industrial design, with the success of fresh, unpredictable campaigns and product lines.
I think this book provides some limited insight, but after the first 40 or so pages, the stringent guidlines become overbearing.
Curiously, I wonder how Nielsen's site, useit.com, would survive a deconstruction? The site is jam-packed with words, and the space is too unified without any visual elements to break it up. I didn't have the patience to scan through it at all.
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