So you don’t know anything about design? And you think it is not fair to have a ugly website? Please stop complaining about your lack of skills and get Jason Beaird’s book. The good thing about The Principles of beautiful web design is that it will take you through design basics and show how to actually apply them to your website. Jason Beaird is a fully trained designer and a professional web designer as well. Such a combination of skills is quite rare, that’s what make Jason’s advice so precious in my opinion.

As far as I’m concerned, grid theory was a great revelation. I now understand why some design will look unbalanced, and why sometimes asymmetry is ok. This book gives more tips about pages layout, color scheme selection, adding texture to layouts, typography theory, imagery management. All explanations are illustrated with examples and resource websites addresses. To give more life to his presentations, Jason built up a design for a tile company all the book long, it is a great way to take the reader by the hand and take him through design steps.

The book is short (168 pages), it is a quick and efficient way to get overview of good web design, before going more in depth in each aspect.

More information about The Principles of beautiful web design can be found on the book website.

This book is the only one I have come across giving a realistic insight in the profession of website management. It gives a clear description of daily tasks as well as ways to manage new projects such as website (re)development. All in all it is a great testimony about the fact that managing a website is a proper job, which takes specific tools and methods to get a professional result.

Among other interesting points, Diffily breaks down website management tasks in several core roles. For instance the publishing process is to be handled by the following roles: editor, contributor, moderator, legal reviewer, designer, developer. He also gives an interesting list of documents to use to ensure website content will meet highest quality standards.

The book also gives a good picture of the web design job, identifying major actors beyond the so well known Graphic Designer. Diffily pays tribute to Information Architects and Interface Designers, and it is good to read.

He repeatedly points out common misconception about supposed easiness of web design and development. The sections about website design demonstrate how an amateurish approach can result in a poor website on graphics, content and functionalities points of view.

A whole chapter focuses on the importance of governance. A website can’t be managed by a poor isolated guy and meet highly strategic goals. Diffily describes entities and documents that may help to make website strategy visible and actually help it to be a global tool for organisation.

Reading The Website Manager’s Handbook is therefore highly recommended for professionals. But they should also recommend it to their managers to help them to get a good overview of what managing a website involves.

More information about The Website Manager’s Handbook can be found on Shane Diffily’s website