COLYTON website designer Adrian W. West has produced his third book on web design.
Adrian, a professional freelance web designer for 17 years, had his first book on intermediate level web design published in May 2012.
His second book, a manual for producing database driven websites, was published in 2014 and his third covers website design for absolute beginners.
All three books are published by Apress in the USA, a subsidiary of Springer, the biggest publisher of science and technical books in the world.
The new book, Practical Web Design for Absolute Beginners, “provides a superior alternative” to the increasing use of Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Moonfruit, Go Daddy, etc.
Mr West said: “These children’s colouring-book-style programs resulted in millions of dreadful websites produced by amateurs who have no training in design, web-user psychology and search engine optimisation. The aim of this book is to teach the readers those essential skills in addition to teaching them how to use HTML and CSS code.”
Adrian says producers promote their CMS programs by implying that HTML and CSS are difficult to learn, but his new book demonstrates that coding is not difficult and it teaches absolute beginners how to produce unique, fast-loading, top-quality websites.
“Understanding HTML and CSS is essential if you wish to take full control of a website’s design and maintenance,” he added.
The book uses short, easily assimilated steps and avoids a tedious theoretical approach by introducing small amounts of new code in each chapter. Using full colour illustrations, beginners are shown how to produce practical web pages right from the start.
The book provides a wide range of attractive templates for web pages and websites and the reader has a short practical project to complete in almost all the chapters. Readers are guided to produce the templates themselves, and as a result, they will have an intimate knowledge of the template’s code giving them complete control over the quality and content of their sites.
Adrian resigned as a chartered engineer to become the UK director of a correspondence school.
He has been teaching in one form or another since 1982 and introduced computers into his workplace in 1987, teaching the staff how to use them. For four years, he taught computer skills for undergraduates at a college in Cheshire.
For the last 17 years, Adrian has designed and maintained websites for local and national businesses and charities. These included local manufacturers, shops, B&B accommodation, tourism, estate agents, retirement homes, travel agencies, charities and an American correspondence course college.
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