Rating: 
Summary: Liked It, Loved It, Bought It!
Review: First of all I knew what this book was like before I bought it. I had, as one does, flicked through it in the bookshop. I design web sites and am also a student.
What this book did for me:
1: Inspired me to improve sites I have designed.
2: Gave me new ideas and concepts to implement and explore.
3. Improved my use of graphics with regards to colour and size.
4. Taught me things about tables, and colours that I didn't know before. What I would recommend this book for:
Anyone looking for some graphical inspiration for the web and also general information on a whole range of interesting ideas. If trying to decide whether to buy this , browse around Dave's web site first and also that of Killersites, If you like those you'll love the book. A reason not to buy it!
If you are looking for a manual or html tutorial this book isn't really for you. As with any book you take what you need, love parts and don't love other parts. You don't always have to agree with the author. That said, this book is outstanding and by far the best on the Web Design shelf in Waterstones, Cork, Ireland.
Rating: 
Summary: Is this about web design, David Seigels ego or VERSO?
Review: All the hype is there, but this book isn't amazing above that. Most of the book seems outdated since I've been using wisiwig editors and I do not subscribe to David's belief system in site building. It's a great overview book on web site creation, but touches on too many subjects and without going too deeply into any one of them. David goes into things like PDF which not too many people need to really go into as a site or web designer.
Rating:
Summary: Big Ego
Review: I read this book and I didn't like it at all. Most of it was how he designed a few sites and I skipped those because they had no use for me. I found a few pages on image formats new information, but the rest was already known. Some of his tips were wrong, like saying horizontal lines cannot be used in a good way.
Rating:
Summary: AMAZING!!! and CLEAR.
Review: This book is the one of the few books which I have ever read with straight foward easy help. A Must have for all web site developers!
Rating:
Summary: Print designers looking to design for the Web. . .
Review: I decided one day to teach myself web design. Im a student and also an experienced print designer and I found "Killer Web Sites" an invaluable tool. The two books I used in creating my web site were this book and a Visual Quikstart Guide to HTML. "Killer Web Sites" bridged the gap nicely between the HTML coding and my creative ideas for my site. I got excited when I found that my school uses this very same book to teach web design.
Not only does it show how, it explores marketing theory. It also contains examples of "Killer Web Sites" and goes into detail of how they were constructed and the problems solved along the way.
I've read reviews complaining that the sites in the book are done in Photoshop and Debabelizer on a Mac and therefore useless to PC users. Those reviews are written by persons not willing to put forth a little effort as far as I'm concerned. I created my web site on a PC! Debabelizer is a nice tool for converting graphics to web-friendly, but it's not necessary. Any Photoshop user with half a brain can still output web-friendly graphics from Photoshop alone. And also, Photoshop is the ultimate in graphics creation software in the first place. You think your going to get nice graphics from using Paint Shop Pro?
And for those complaining that killer sites don't work on earlier or text-based browsers. Siegal explains that you have to establish who will be viewing your site and what they will be using to view it with. You then make a decision as how many colors and graphics, screen resolution and what not. Simple enough, if your still in jam, make a text-based alternative.
Doug Molidor
Lounge 9 from Outer Space
Rating:
Summary: With love from Russia.
Review: As u guess, i'm from Russia, where the Internet hi-tech is the past in your country... But we now, whet the word 'design' means. This book is the best! Really. So thanx for for attention...
Rating:
Summary: An Excellent design book for programmers
Review: This is an excellent book for people who come from a more structured background like programming. This book has the details coders need to make serious sites. it has the tips that makes some web pages better than others.
Rating: 
Summary: Save your money if you have already purchased 1st edition!
Review: Killer sites seccond edition is a sad excuse for a complete update and a hefty price tag. I don't know if doing this book was David's idea or his greedy publisher at Hayden. I never give out 10's. A book needs to be worth it's weight in gold a couple times over to achieve a score such as that from me. I think this book would have been good for my line of work hadn't I purchased the first edition last year. In retrospect I would have questioned my purchase a bit more. If you don't yet have this book I do recremend it as a book on site design. Killer sites goes into a bit of David's own design philosophy and gives you points to agree or disagree and make your own design decisions (however I mainly disagreed at times). Also recremended is Designing web graphics.2 by Lynda Weinman for a detailed look into the making of web graphics.
Rating: 
Summary: Form over function
Review: In the choice between style and substance, the author chooses style. Well, he's a professional designer! To the unitiated (like me) the design ideas are good, the information on processing images is good, and the outlook is fresh.The experienced software engineer, though, will cringe and wince. His recommendations for site architecture would spell disaster for any other than a small site, his use of tags would convert the HTML to page-layout, and some of the information in the book is in error. With the advent of DHTML and HTML 4, much of the remaining technical information in the book is out of date.Take the design wisdom, and disregard any technical suggestions.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't buy if you already have the first edition.
Review: I bought this book for my design staff, as if they would be getting some great new information that would advance me as a graphic designer in the world of web graphics, but I found it to be the same matterial regurgitated with a couple of new images swaped out as examples. I expected far much more than what I got. In fact I was shocked to find that I actualy liked the first edition better.
| 
