Professional Web Design

Book excerpt: Whether you are an intermediate Web designer looking to take your sites to the next level or a more experienced designer looking to improve your professional skills, you will find the tools to meet your needs in "Professional Web Design: Techniques andTemplates," Second Edition. This completely updated version of the best-selling book features the 50 professional-quality, license-free Web design templates from the original, as well as 15 new templates, all of which can be easily customized and extended. Each ready-to-use design includes a homepage, and one second-level page, and the framework to build subsequent pages. All of the specific techniques that are required for building these and other highly usable sites have been updated to cover the latest technologies, including HTML, XHTML, JavaScript, CSS, Photoshop CS, and PHP. Also included are five new HTML e-mail templates, an increasingly important marketing tool. Detailed tutorials and hands-on projects teach both basic and sophisticated design concepts, including how to create designs for low, medium, or high content sites and the strengths and weaknesses of each. The new edition also includes four new chapters on Cascading Style Sheets, using client-side scripting, creating dynamic sites, and an overview of the new Web designs. It covers important topics such as client- and server-side scripting, security, and using databases to update a site's content.