Williams and Tollett: I love the 90's

Much like Nicole, I also had mixed feelings about the Williams and Tollett book. I think the text is a valuable resource for those that have little or no experience building websites, but I designed my first site my sophomore year of high school (circa 1997) using one of the first versions of Microsoft FrontPage and I’ve tried to keep up on various web-authoring tools since then. Granted, way back when I made several poor design choices (one example being that each separate page on the site had a different background color), but as Williams and Tollett note, much of design is trail and error. I did a fair amount of cool things too (at least, they were cool in the mid-90’s) like incorporating MIDI files, web-counters, etc, and I learned quite a bit from just looking at other websites and simply playing around with the program(s). I suppose one key criticism I have of the text is that notion of “play” isn’t emphasized much, instead the reader is given a series of step-by-step mandates (which, again, is wonderful in terms of beginners that need strict guidance to get them started, but I often found myself disconnected because Williams and Tollett were describing procedures to programs that I don’t have in my possession – i.e. Photoshop and Dreamweaver). One other minor irritation was their constant “plugging” of other books (including their own). A few references to useful books on related topics, fine – several references to books published by the same company as Williams and Tollet’s book (Peachpit Press), hmm…