Adobe Master Class: Web Site Redesigns (Adobe Professional Library) Book

Adobe Master Class: Web Site Redesigns shows how nine top design teams tackled the task of redesigning websites as diverse as glide.org--a San Fransisco-based community church and epinions.com---an on-line store featuring consumer-written product reviews and ratings. The focus is firmly on the planning and process side of site redesign. For travel site trip.com, design firm Method carried out extensive research both with trip.com employees and its customers--business travellers in order to create a "personal travel centre". Post Tool Design helped Chroniclebooks.com carry the design aesthetic of its books through to the Web site using Flash. And the high profile New York firm Hillmancurtis enabled software company Adobe to expand the types of information and tools on offer to site visitors. It would have been easy for this book to turn into a free advert for the design companies it features, but Darcy Dinucci has avoided that by sticking, in detailed narrative, to the process at every stage. Perhaps most usefully, this approach extends to the failures as well as the successes and we get to find out about the scrapped site plans, rejected visuals and scratched content. Don't assume that because you don't work for a top agency there's nothing here for you. Mostly, the book's success is due to the variety it encompasses. The clients, the studios, the individual team members and the problems that they solve cover just about every situation you are likely to encounter. As the author herself concludes "What this variety shows is that there's no one right way to design a Web site". --Ken McMahonRead More