Defensive Design for the Web

This book reminds me of Joel Spolskys "Interface Design for Programmers" but with less of the humour, and more examples. It teaches almost entirely by example. The book has an axiom "No matter how well you design websites, things will go wrong". Rather than arguing with that point, this book shows you useful tricks to prevent, solve, recover and help with these problems.

The book presents you with 40 precise guidelines that if followed will make sure that your site doesn't piss people off due to errors. (You can still piss them due to other reasons, such as visual rape, mystery navigation, or using a light grey on white color scheme with a miniscule font (I'd link, but there are just too many). The book also presents you with a test at the end that you can score your website in accordance with. This is quite useful, as it can be passed around to colleagues/people you think need it/friends so that they can improve their sites. 230 pages of rock hard content, examples of good and bad design, and good solutions to tricky scenarios.

It helps that this book is by Jason Fried and Matthew Linderman, the Kings of "Zero Bullshit" who work at 37Signals. 37 Signals broadcast a clear enough message "If you're a small company developing a web hosted service, stop acting like you're a big company. You're wasting your time and money" The explanation of this can be found in their next book Getting Real". Many people seem to think that 37 Signals are saying "This is the only way to run a company", and as such a lot of people complain about the approach. The only problem with the book Getting Real, is that its only available in PDF, which is a pain in the bollox. I do all my reading on the train or in bed. I stare at a monitor long enough as it is, I'm not about to start reading books off one.

So, to summarise, if you do webdesign this is a good light short read. The only complaint I have is that its not in colour. Many of the screenshots of websites would look nicer in colour. The book is available to Minds members from the Minds Library.