Do It Yourself? Best Books for Web Design

I've been working with a couple of local web designers on a whole bunch of websites lately. It's so luxurious to sit down with a designer and work out all the details of navigation and then write and design together to create something that's just what the client wants.

Not that I don't enjoy working with designers at a distance (have I mentioned lately how much I like Adobe screen sharing?). Not that I don't enjoy the challenge of making a difference for a website that perhaps wasn't so much designed as cobbled together. Not that I don't like the surprise of sending content off and only later seeing what the designer comes up with from the words. But there is something very right about starting from scratch with a computer and some paper and ideas.

At the same time that I've been reveling in the luxury of doing websites in this way, I've had a message from an old friend who wants to make her own website for her llama farm.

Now, I'm all for DIY. At my house, we grow our own vegetables, bake our own bread, make our own soap, play our own music, fix our own cars, and knit our own sweaters. But I don't make my own websites. I don't cut my own hair, either. I know my limitations.

I have, however, studied about the making of websites a lot. I need to know what's possible, I need to be able to tell what's been done at a website, and I need to know how one would go about making a website so I can work usefully with designers. So I can recommend some good books for web design. Here are my favorites (and click the links for samples and stuff):

• Head First Web Design, by Ethan Watrall and Jeff Siarto, is a step-by-step, hands-on, fun guide by the clever people at O'Reilly. I love the Head First series -- I've actually got a proposal with them right now -- and I strongly recommend this book for beginners. It goes through site architecture, color choices, and navigation, and on to podcasts and user testing. At 463 pages, this is a big, heavy, expensive book, but by the time you read through it, you'll know most of the important things about web design. Pair this book with Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML for true confidence.
• Build Your Own Web Site the Right Way Using HTML and CSS by Ian Lloyd from Sitepoint is less playful, but has the basics of html and css right there in the book. It's complete and straightforward, and a particularly good choice if you learned some html way back in the past and need an update. It's slightly less heavy and slightly less expensive than the Head First book, and it really doesn't go into aesthetic issues. This book will let the serious-minded among us build a website with Notepad and some free online tools.
• Don't Make Me Think, by Steve Krug, is a terrific guide to usability. It doesn't tell you how to write html or put your website online, but it does tell you how to make your website work for visitors and search engines, which is largely the point. if you're already a hobbyist web designer or you know css but find that your websites turn out looking disappointing, this book will be extremely useful. It's also a good reference if you're going to be working with a designer who knows art but not SEO. This book will allow you to speak in the computer guy's language when the flights of artistic fancy threaten to overwhelm practical factors in designing your website.

The honest truth is that making a good, successful website takes a lot of study and a certain amount of talent to begin with. I'm not a graphic artist, and I know it. That's just not my medium. But if you're determined, these three books are a great place to start. If you want to know enough about design to make good decisions in collaboration with your designer, they're just what you need.

My friend with the llama farm? I'll keep you posted. She's pretty talented, and I guess a person could do a good deal of study while minding a passel of llamas. She may turn out an excellent DYI website.
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