• Covers the nuts and bolts of basic HTML and style sheets, with detailed examples of formatting text, adding graphic elements, making links, creating tables and frames, and using color on the Web.
• Explains whether to use GIFs or JPEGs for different types of images, and includes important tips on optimizing graphics for web delivery.
• Provides dozens of web design do and don'ts, to help you make good web design decisions and avoid common beginner traps.
• Contains hands-on exercises throughout the book that allow you to try out new techniques along the way.

In Learning Web Design, author Jennifer Niederst Robbins shares the knowledge she's gained from years of Web design experience, both as a designer and a teacher. She has taught Web design at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and Johnson and Wales University in Providence. Jennifer Niederst Robbins was one of the first designers for the Web. As the designer of O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator (GNN), the first commercial web site, she has been designing for the Web since 1993. Since then, she has worked as the creative director of Songline Studios (a former subsidiary of O'Reilly) and as a freelance designer and consultant since 1996. She is the author of the bestselling Web Design in a Nutshell. She has spoken at major design and Internet events including SXSW Interactive, Seybold Seminars, the GRAFILL conference (Geilo, Norway), and one of the first W3C International Expos.

  --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Customer Reviews & Comments
This review is from: Learning Web Design : A Beginner's Guide to HTML, Graphics, and Beyond (Paperback) Jennifer Niederst is just the person you want to write a book like this. Many readers of this page will already know who she is, but since this book is aimed at absolute beginners a short introduction may be in order. Originally a graphic designer, in 1993 Niederst became one of the very first web designers when she worked on the world's first commercial website (O'Reilly & Associates' Global Network Navigator, which is no longer in publication but you can see samples of it on Niederst's own website if you want; write me for the URL). Since then she's been one of the best-known web designers around and she's written other books on the topic -- notably _Web Design in a Nutshell_, which I highly recommend you get as a followup to this one (but wait for the new second edition, due out in October 2001). Since Al Gore didn't even _invent_ the Internet until 1993, that makes Niederst the nearest thing there is to an "old-timer" in what is, after all, a pretty new profession. Niederst has said in interviews that this book is the one she wished she'd had to give her web-design students. It won't take you long to see why; it's painstakingly thorough and detailed, just the ticket for somebody who has never written a speck of HTML code before and is a little fuzzy on just what this "Internet" thing is. But it's also helpful to people at other stages of knowledge. The coverage (mostly HTML and graphics, with a little bit of appetite-whetting overview at the end about more advanced techniques like cascading style sheets, JavaScript, and XML) is so complete that if, like me, you learned this stuff on your own, it will fill in _lots_ of gaps in your education. (Over the last year or two I've gotten pretty proficient with text but I knew almost zilch about graphics until I read this book.) And even if you already know all this stuff cold, this book will probably still be handy as a reference and a source of helpful advice. Then, too, it's also a handy rough-and-ready guide to the sorts of application software you might want to acquire if you're getting seriously into web design. Niederst not only introduces the major players among authoring tools and graphics packages, but steps through her examples more than once to show you how they work in, e.g., Dreamweaver and GoLive. The style is breezy and chatty but with no loss of accuracy. You'll find out why Niederst thinks "web design is cool" and you'll learn some of "Jen's pet peeves" (e.g. spinning-globe graphics and rainbow bars), but you'll also get a thorough and accessible introduction to the nuts and bolts of web design. If you're just getting started on the creation of web pages, this is the book to use first. As I noted above, you'll probably also want to get Niederst's _Nutshell_ book as a sequel. After that, you'll be well qualified to decide what else you need.