World Wide Web: How To Design and Construct Web Pages (2nd ed.)

Citation

Calvert, P. (2001), "World Wide Web: How To Design and Construct Web Pages (2nd ed.)", The Electronic Library, Vol. 19 No. 6, pp. 445-445. https://doi.org/10.1108/el.2001.19.6.445.4

If you really know nothing about making Web pages then this little book, part of the “Know‐How Guides” series, will be a good, cheap, starting point. The initial chapters are about the Web itself, just to clarify the kind of medium it is for a budding publisher. The steps towards sensible design come next, though personally I dislike the misuse of the word “design” in this context: some people spend years studying graphic design so how can we “design” a Web page with no training at all? The meat of the book comes in the chapters on the basics of adding images and links to text, handling forms, using tables, adding colour, and the use of frames. Up to this point the book sticks to the basics and should be understandable by people with little experience of HTML. But I suspect that even with the topic of frames the content is getting a little bit beyond the scope of an introductory guide. So as the book progresses through to the use of JavaScript and then to adding multimedia, I have to wonder if the beginner will keep pace. The chapter on publishing the pages on the Web are essential, of course, though with so many variations in the way Internet Service Providers offer their services around the world, it is almost impossible to condense this into a simple short chapter. There is good list of further resources in the last chapter.

This is a very good book for getting you started on Web authoring and I can happily recommend it to information managers who know little or nothing about HTML. There are other places you could start, of course, and this book is not so different to many other guides to getting started, but the examples are kept relevant to information management here so that is one good reason for using this book. As an example, the guide to creating a form is a “How did you find our Web page?” questionnaire. My assumption is that once the reader has learned the basics there will be plentiful resources around for taking the next steps.