Creating Killer Web Sites (2nd Edition)

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Summary: This is one of the best design books published
Review: "Creating Killer Websites" is a pratical guide packed with information. It is a must read for any would be "web designer"

Rating:
Summary: NOT RECREMENDED!!!
Review: This book delivers some great information on web page layout as of May of 96, however it's time for an update because it's getting old. The design ideas and tips by David Siegel ride the line of mediocrity and encourage everyone to design cloned sites of his. David slaps the wrist of people that don't design in his way, and discourages simplicity to promote complex integrated imagry for better or worse. Great design existed long before David Siegel and the concept of 3rd generation sites its an invention for David to give himself the credit and glory of what multimedia and television compositing is before he came around. Davids ego in design gets in the way of what good design realy is and promotes himself to be a design god for his mediocre works. The book is nothing but a promotion for his ego and his production house in San Francisco. If you want to get a job with him, then perhapse this is the manual for you to follow. However I believe that this book misleads begining designers to believe some false design principals that might inhibit their design potential. Perhapse going to a library and looking at books of designers for inspiration might prove to be beneficial. In general I was disapointed with Davids book after all the hype, and have proceeded to look elsewhere to other books for web design. As far as web graphics are concerned I would highly recremend Designing Web Graphics.2 by Lynda Weinman, it's twice as thick as Creating Mediocre Sites and is filled with new and recent information on web design avaible here at amazon.com.

Rating:
Summary: Deserves a "Top 5%" stamp of approval.
Review: The book was great. Easy to understand and informative with great examples and visual giudes through out. Appendix 2 "The Colour Cube" section is something that I know I will use over and over again

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic; a must read.
Review: Not for the novice; this book will speak to anyone who has already struggled with the challenges of designing large commercial sites. It changed my entire outlook on Web publishing

Rating:
Summary: The best web book I've read
Review: I would have to say that this book is the best web book I have ever read it takes a unique approach to web pages that should be the standard approach. As a Graphic Designer I lost sight of the fact that web pages need not be dictated by the technology and that the technology can be made to work for you instead of limiting you. This book hopfully will make designers think more about the look of thier pages instead of how the HTML is used

Rating:
Summary: Valuable guidelines for page designers
Review: I enjoy David's approach. For critical pages that are to catch the imagination of the user or attract visitors, a thoughtful design is needed. Siegel decribes hands on technical and asthethic details of how to accomplish this without touching much on the more high-tech methods of todays industry (Java,Active-X, plugins, etc) which may be just as good to leave out for pages that are need to work for a broad audience. The book is in the same category as 'designing web graphics' by Lynda Weinman but takes design approaches and focus on user psychology a bit further. Both of these are fine books. This is for those pages that need to look good.

Rating:
Summary: Not Bad!
Review: Not Bad...I enjoyed the book, but it could use some improvment

Rating:
Summary: A beautiful, eye-opening, and immensely useful book.
Review:
I just purchased this book the other day on a hunch. I had
seen David's site, and seen the "Killer" Site, and liked
what I found, and when I suddenly needed an advanced book,
it didn't take me long to settle on this one.
. . Having bought it, I immediately started reading
and browsing it, and rarely have I enjoyed a book this much.
I am not one of the access-to-every-browser nazis that
have so much to say about how I should and should not design
the sites I work on, and I am 110% behind absolute control
for web designers. Let others design grey lists of links
and horizontal rules, and let me do what I want to do.
. . About the best thing that could happen with this
book is that it becomes redundant because of new levels of
control in the browsers, but since that is highly unlikely,
this book is the next best thing to total control. Great
tips are everywhere in this book.
. . I will immediately start to experiment with the
tips in this book on my two sites:
. . EDM/2 at
. . http://www.os2ss.com/edm2/
and
. . The Unofficial HASSELBLAD at
. . http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/u/bcrwhims/hasselblad/
(the second of which is a work in progress and still needs
lots of changes.)

Bottom line: if you want tighter control of layout, buy
this book! If you want your page to be readable by all
versions of all browsers, don't.



Rating:
Summary: Fast Photoshop and web design solutions.
Review: Within one hour, I was using ideas and suggestions. I've already utilized Siegel's reminderon creating transparent GIFs. The samples in the book provide new creative ideas for my designs. I appreciate his approach to pushing online design beyond a basic HTML layout. The print job on the book is very impressive.

Rating:
Summary: Awakening the aesthetic...
Review: Apart from the specifics of designing fine web sites, I found that David's book took the large mass of collected aesthetic experience in my mind and provided a formal structure upon which it could be viewed and used. 1997 will be an interesting year for me as a result of reading Killer..