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DDftW = 2004 Best Book

04 Jan 2005 by Matthew Linderman

Defensive Design for the Web was named the best web design book of 2004 by Design, Typography and Graphics Magazine. Thanks DT&G!

This excellent book…completes the circle in the maturation of the web. Building web sites is not enough. Learning and using CSS is not enough. Now we have to make sure it works and keeps on working…If you design for the web, you’ll be needing this.

6 comments so far (Post a Comment)

04 Jan 2005 | Jake said...

I second that, DDftW is THE BEST web design book I read last year. Excelent job guys!

04 Jan 2005 | Jesse said...

Yup. Although I think there were some really good books in 2004, yours is by far the most useful.

05 Jan 2005 | Will Hayworth said...

I've heard nothing but wonderful things about it. I just ordered my copy off of Amazon.

05 Jan 2005 | Stephane Deschamps (nota-bene.org) said...

Hey, guess what. I've got it in my bag right now, it's what I'm reading while commuting.

And yeah, I'll put it in the top shelf, right up with Steve Krug's "Don't make me think".

It's not that you've found incredible things, it's just that you've got much more (not-so-)common sense than most of us.

And for that I *will* recommend the book too.

05 Jan 2005 | Adam Michela said...

Awesome work fellas!

My fabulous girlfriend grabbed me a copy for Christmas... it definately is atop my favorite gift list :)

I can't wait until I have the time to read it through-and-through, front-to-back!!

One thing specific to my needs that I didn't find in there, how to effectively communicate with users when your URL changes?

I recently combined several large web sites into one large community, while the majority of my old domains will always direct to the appropriate spot in the new community, one domain was on lease. It is crucial that my users update their bookmarks.

How can I give them incentive, or better yet, force them (gracefully) to move on.

Currently, I'm redesigning the sites, bringing desired content off the sub pages and up to the root level... I'm hoping this will get a large bit of users going to our home page first rather than to a sub-community (where the old domains redirect to)

Anyway, this is a new problem. I hoped the book would give me some fresh ideas on this subject as it has on so many others. Maybe some of the readers here have some fine examples?

I'm thinking something a little more friendly than the Pixy colour tool redirect :)

05 Jan 2005 | beto said...

Gotta agree. Your Defensive Design book is the one to give to those jaded web developers who say they've seen it all and know everything under the sun. It's the perfect stepping stone for the next generation of web development, where the user is all what really counts instead of being an afterthought. I personally enjoyed it very much. Congrats!

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