Book review : Guidelines for Online Success

Written by industry experts, this book is a collection of best practices for web application and website development. Divided into 6 chapters (Interface & design, Marketing & Communication, Technology & Programming, Technical advice, Content/Content management and E-commerce) and widely illustrated, “do” & “don’t” are discussed about many notions of web development. Anyway, this book doesn’t assumes his title at all as it’s more a collection of pictures of nice websites than practices to follow. Even worse, among the few practices we’re given, many of them are completely unuseful and even redundant.

Pros

• Full-color book
• Very well crafted, original divisions into “tabbed” chapters with color schemes for each one of them

Cons

• Absolutely not a collection of “guidelines”, too few text and way too many pictures
• Some “guidelines” are completely dumb, such as “don’t make ugly layouts” and “don’t hide your navigation”
• Because the book is written by many people, some “guidelines” are redundant. I was told at least 5 times in the book that “my website should not take too long to load”

Conclusion

Absolutely not interesting about the “guidelines” aspect, but the book stills remains valuable if you’re using it like a “Web Design Index” for inspiration of best web productions.