Visual & "wordy" is what makes this book great!

books:


	• Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability Luke Wroblewski Wiley, 2002 - 364 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Good info, could be condensed

This book lays a good foundation for web design by emphasizing planning, meeting clients' goals, and understanding the target audience. Wroblewski emphasizes usability when describing the core of the site- structure, navigation, content- and how it will affect the experience of the audience. He uses numerous examples to illustrate layout, visual heirarchy, color schemes, and how they work together (or don't!) to communicate quickly and effectively to the site visitor.

I got frustrated about the amount of fluff surrounding actual information. He makes plenty of good points and then buries them beneath a barrage of condescending, long-winded metaphors, like the way we can read a map and know that blue represents water. The analogy itself could be helpful, but three paragraphs to explain the analogy is just distracting.

I'm glad I read it... it opened my eyes to many challenges that web designers face, and inspired me to infuse life and personality into my own site. I'm also glad I highlighted the meaningful parts so I (or friends who borrow it) can skip past the fluff in the future.

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Great Combination of Web and Design Knowledge

Luke Wroblewski, in his book Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability, offers an interesting and, in my view, much needed perspective on the topic of web design. In Section One, he starts at the very beginning, explaining what is basically the design process every designer learns in school. This includes such things as researching your client, documenting your process, generating a mission statement or goal for the website, organizing content and developing an effective navigation system---things that should be thought through before ever firing up the html editor. This information is invaluable for anyone approaching a web design project because it reduces the chance for major revisions further into a project and makes it easier for a designer to do his or her best creative work.

Section Two gets more focused, describing the peculiarities of communicating via the web. I found particularly gratifying the suggestion to not "break the web model"---the established idiom of the web including the back button, bookmarks, history, etc. This is not a follow your bliss kind of web design book. It is a carefully thought through guide for what works and what does not work for effective communication on the web. The author also focuses here on the importance of getting and maintaining quality content for your website and how to make content dominant through visual organization and establishing a hierarchy of information. The next chapter in this section provides a primer on the Principles of Visual Organization---an invaluable resource for anyone approaching this kind of project and something that is largely missing from other books in this genre.

The last section of this book gives more specific information about how to put all these pieces together, where to experiment and where to maintain the established web idiom and web conventions. Lastly the author addresses the issues of dynamic websites and dynamic content delivery---a potential solution to the problem of keeping content current. Throughout the book, the author develops an effective interplay between the general guiding principles of design and the more specific requirements of the web medium. For this reason I think it is an excellent and unique resource for web designers and developers that I would highly recommend.

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Still a 'must have' book four years later.

This is the book to buy after you have two other basic books on web design. As your other books are thrown away or replaced you will still need 'Site-Seeing'. It covers both the history and progress of web design. Read this book in bed or on a plane trip, preferably not in front of a monitor. I also found it helpful not to take the chapters in any formal order. Delve in! You will be helped. To me, this book is so solid that an upgrade is still a couple of years away.

Visual & "wordy" is what makes this book great!

As a fan of Site-Seeing, I must respond to a few of the reviews asserting that the author should have condensed certain material in the book. For me, the many visual examples and the great, detailed explanations (one reviewer suggested "wordy") are exactly what makes this book so useful. Rather than just skimming over important design concepts, the author actually takes the time to properly explain these important principles and illustrate them with examples. In my opinion, many other web design books use only words, whereas in this book, you can actually see and understand what the author is talking about. This is very important to me, as a visual learner. That is just one reason why this book is still on my desk.

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reviews: page 1, 2

Although Web usability has received lots of hype, especially during the dot-com meltdown, the focus has been mostly on technical issues. Usability experts stress the pitfalls of frames and too many images on Web pages. They recommend editing out unnecessary words and writing in a non-linear style-all valuable advice, of course. But less frequently do they highlight the importance of the visual presentation of Web pages.

The Web is a communication medium that does most of its talking visually. What you see on a Web page tells you what you might find within the site, how to get there, and why it might interest you-not to mention the instinctive emotional response that shapes your Web experience. As a result, Web usability issues are communication issues. Easy-to-use sites are those that communicate quickly and effectively.

Site-Seeing takes a fresh approach to Web usability by applying visual communication principles and decision-making to Web design. Specifically, readers will learn the key concepts behind visual organization, look and feel, technical considerations, and clear planning that stem from audience awareness. Through numerous, full-color examples author Luke Wroblewski deconstructs "the good, the bad, and the ugly" of Web design.

The visual presentation of a site does more than merely making it pretty. It organizes information according to function. It creates distinct and appropriate personalities. It provides emotional impact and attachment. In short, it engages the audience-and keeps them coming back.

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