Comments for Gravity Design

Comment on Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) by Marcos O. Cabral

Marcos O. Cabral — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 10:32:48 +0000

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

One of the bests CSS books, March 18, 2008

Marcos O. Cabral (DF Brazil) -

This review is from: Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design (Wrox Beginning Guides) (Paperback)

This book is what it's intend to be: an excellent book for CSS beginners. Good sequence of chapters, good examples, and the wellcome surprise of color sintax and screen pictures.
Congratulations to Wrox, and I expect that other books could be printed with same quality presentation.

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Comment on How to Open & Operate a Financially Successful Web Site Design Business: With Companion CD – ROM by Riley N. "Riley N."

Riley N. "Riley N." — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 09:57:45 +0000

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

Poor Quality Book All Around, January 16, 2010

Riley N. "Riley N." (chicago, il) -

This review is from: How to Open & Operate a Financially Successful Web Site Design Business: With Companion CD - ROM (Paperback)

I was extremely disappointed with this book. It is almost 400 pages and most of it is what I can best describe as "annoying fluff" that provides vague suggestions that provide no real value to the reader. Here is an example of a paragraph in the book:

P.210 "The success of your marketing is also going to depend, in part, on how well you deal with people who follow up on your ads. There is no point in creating and paying for good advertisements only to fall short in the follow up process. You can present whatever information you want about your business, but if you do not have good follow-up, your marketing efforts will be wasted."

The author constantly repeats themselves throughout the book across chapters and in the above case, within the same paragraph. The above paragraph could have been widdled down to 1 sentence or bullet point. It feels as though the author is babbling to make the book as long as possible (like I used to do in college to reach the minimum page requirement for my essays). The book was written by two different people and it feels very in-cohesive, as if they just divided up topics and started writing with poor organization. I doubt the author(s) has any special skill or training in teaching.

The book wanders off for chapters talking about general business topics that are not specific to web design businesses. For example, there are pages and pages about how to conduct yourself in an interview. The author is suggesting you are interviewing with your clients when it is actually more similar to a sales presentation. There is a paragraph just about the perfect handshake and the author stresses that it could be the key to whether you get your client or not. Pretty ridiculous to me.

Overall, the book provides some relevant information but not a lot of specific calls to action about web design-specific topics. Neither of the authors even have a web site of their own to show for. I don't think they are qualified to write a how-to book on web design. I have a little background in business and web design and this book was 90% useless. For some reason I decided I had to read some sort of how-to book to make myself feel prepared before I went on my own. This book was very painful to read and made me feel stupid for wasting my time on it. People who are really directionless and lost might find this book more useful, but it is probably a waste of money for people who are already savvy and don't need to be babied about the obvious. This book is ridiculously overpriced and wasn't even edited (several grammatical errors) and the printing and binding is even lopsided! This is an amateur book in all respects.

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Comment on Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) by Patricia G. Conley

Patricia G. Conley — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 09:45:04 +0000

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

Everything I was looking for in just one book, May 18, 2008

Patricia G. Conley (Atlanta, GA) -

This review is from: Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design (Wrox Beginning Guides) (Paperback)

When searching for a technical manual, I usually am able to narrow the field down to just 2 or 3 that together will cover my needs.

I sat down with a stack of about 15 books on CSS, including the most popular listed on Amazon, and started thumbing through them to evaluate their content, organization, reference material, indexing, etc. I eliminated several books, and had a tall stack of possible books to one side when I opened this book. I was first struck by the simple beauty of the book layout. The material in this book is presented in an exceptionally pleasing manner, easy to read, and well punctuated with examples and graphics. Code is colorcoded so the reader can easily pick out the portions being described in the text, and followed by color photos of the actual screens resulting from the code.

The book is logically organized and includes the best and most comprehensive reference section of all the books I considered.

The topics are easy to read and clearly presented. There are exercises to do which allow the reader to actually test-drive the techniques described and accompanying code files are available on the website to go along with the book.

I was surprised to find one book that contained everything that I look for in a technical manual. Hurray! I didn't have to buy 2 or 3 books to cover all the bases.

Thank you Richard York.

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Comment on How to Open & Operate a Financially Successful Web Site Design Business: With Companion CD – ROM by K. Van Veen

K. Van Veen — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 09:42:17 +0000

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

A Welcome Pleasure!, December 16, 2009

K. Van Veen (Pacific NW) -

This review is from: How to Open & Operate a Financially Successful Web Site Design Business: With Companion CD - ROM (Paperback)

Simply - I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The content is well organized in a progression of information that makes sense when starting any business. There are relative and applicable links or references at the end of each chapter as well as questions to ask yourself before moving onto the next step in your business.

This book will help me greatly in my own endeavors to start a web design business. I recommend it highly!

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