Web Pages That Suck

by Vincent Flanders & Michael Willis
Sybex: £29.99
ISBN 0-7821-2187-X

“Learn good design by looking at bad design” says the subtitle, which sounds oxymoronic (at least). In fact, it’s not as daft as it sounds. It is striking that so many people creating the first page make exactly the same mistakes. Almost everyone goes for a black background, or a tiled background image, with centre-aligned text, usually multi-coloured; if they can figure how to change the font, they do — repeatedly; enormous images are stuck on the home page, generally quite a few because these pages are at least six screens long…

All right, this book will probably not be a lot of help if you are an experienced site designer. On the other hand, if you are trying to cobble together your first site, it will give you a good idea of things to avoid. Even if you are a talented designer, you can learn a lot about things to avoid that might not occur to someone who is concerned about the appearance of a site but does not know some of the limitations imposed by the nature of the Net.

It is an entertaining book, although written relentlessly in relaxed American — doesn’t bother me, I’ve worked with Californians so I’m used to it, but you may find it wearing. Sometimes it is good to just relax and smile, and learn a lot as you do so.

There are a couple of caveats: the book is a few years old, so a lot of the URLs quoted no longer work, and those which do are often no longer identical to the screenshots included here — well, you would not expect them to be, would you? The big developments of recent years in DHTML don’t really feature, unsurprisingly, although CSS does get a mention. Aside from the age question, the comments on the use of the ALT attribute should be handled with caution: read around about the use of this.

This book will not teach you how to use HTML. What it will do is give you a basic idea of what doesn’t work on the Web and why it doesn’t work, rather like learning by experience without the painful aspects of that! I would recommend it to anyone struggling with their first web pages.