Other external links
- Site Manager
- Site Design
- Cascading Style Sheets
- Font foundries & sources
- HTML & XHTML
- Java servlets
- XML & XSLT
- Javascript & DOM
- News groups
Recommendations
This guide is part of the Code Style Anchor Points section, a collection of external links from across this site, split by subject.
Please bookmark the Code Style home page before you go.
Web site design books
- Don't Make Me Think
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By Steve Krug
A richly illustrated book that gets straight to the point of Web design; users will not tolerate sites that make it difficult to get what they want. This is a book that will set you thinking, "that's what I thought!" throughout, but Krug shows rather than tells and the points are more successful for it.
Order this book online at Amazon UK
- Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
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By Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville
This book wades into the nitty gritty issues of classification, organisation and labelling systems for Web content with a clear methodology that will help you think twice about how obvious your navigation schemes really are. The authors include many practical tips on research and planning for content acquisition and deployment throughout.
Order this book online at Amazon UK
- Taking Your Talent To The Web
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By Jeffrey Zeldman
The often outspoken advocate general of the Web Standards Project and leading light of A List Apart takes a refreshing, user friendly tour through the must have skills in Web development. Zeldman's no-nonsense approach to "What is anti-aliasing?" and the like is very engaging and enjoyable to read.
Order this book online at Amazon UK
- Web Redesign: Workflow That Works
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By Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler
This is a book that extends one's perspective on commercial design and development projects. There are no big surprises in the scope of the subject matter, but the authors deliver a well grounded, methodical guide to the delivery of large scale Web sites from which any reader will glean useful professional techniques.
Order this book online at Amazon UK
- Designing Web Usability: The Practice Of Simplicity
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by Jakob Nielsen
If one can look beyond the prescriptive, evangelistic zeal of the author, there are gems to be found in this book. For every well documented case there is an overstated conclusion to be drawn, however, so take Neilsen's advice with a measure of scepticism.
Order this book online at Amazon UK
Image editing software
- Photoshop 7.0
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Adobe Systems
The latest version of Adobe's top of the range image editing package comes with a price tag to match, but if you can afford Photoshop you won't want for much more. The huge extent and precision of the features will take time to grasp, but the palette based user interface hides the complexity until you are ready to use it.
Photoshop incorporates ImageReady for Web optimisation with integral support for GIF and Javascript image animation that preserves original layers, masks and effects. Another valuable feature is the facility to record macros that can be re-played manually or used to run automated conversions on batches of images.
- Photoshop Elements
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Adobe Systems
If the full deal isn't in your price range, Adobe's cut-down version of Photoshop is a practical fall-back that retains compatibility with native
.psdfiles. Photoshop Elements comes with a large share of the full product's key feature set.- Photoshop Elements at Amazon UK
- Paint Shop Pro 7 10th Anniversary Edition
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Jasc Software
Long regarded as Photoshop's poor relation, Paint Shop Pro has evolved into strong competition in recent editions, with independent layer control and vector based type and drawing tools featured. The user interface retains many of its long-standing idiosyncrasies, but is practically much improved over previous versions.
Paint Shop Pro supports a broad range of output file formats, and is gradually outgrowing its amateur status.
- Paint Shop Pro 7 at Amazon UK
- QuickTime VR Authoring Studio
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Apple
The original and best package for creating wrap-around "virtual reality" panoramas from a series of digital stills with a remarkably obvious user interface. Extensive pre-configured support for common lens combinations is complemented with fine manual adjustment and blending between each tile in the panorama. The internal hyperlinking scheme allows the creation of continuous VR scenes from multiple panoramas.
- QuickTime VR Authoring Studio at Amazon UK
Web page design
The HTML FAQ by HTML Help covers all aspects of Web page design, including:
Accessibility services
The Bobby accessibility review tool has been taken out of public service and is now only available as a part of the IBM Rational Policy Tester Accessibility Edition. The system scans Web sites and reports accessibility issues in relation to the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, or optionally the U.S. Section 508 Guidelines.
Colour & image preparation
- Prepare for a shock: Death of the Websafe Color Palette? by David Lehn and Hadley Stern at Webmonkey lays to rest the myth of a universally compatible colour palette for the Web.
- Dithering - good, bad, and ugly by Todd Fahrner discusses the benfits of using the WebScrub plug-in for Photoshop.
Colour and accessibility
- Effective Color Contrast by Aries Arditi is a simple illustrated guide to the three key parameters of hue, lightness and saturation and how they can contribute to better legibility for all users.
- Color Vision, Color Deficiency by Diane Wilson is a slightly more technical briefing on colour perception and impairment and its consequences for Web colour selection.
Anchor Points categories
See Anchor Points: Code Style for a digest of links from the site log.
