Web Design in Easy Steps

Book cover: Web Design in Easy Steps By Sean McManus

The book Web Design in Easy Steps teaches readers what they need to know about creating websites that are both effective and easy to use. It takes readers through the whole process of building a website, starting with planning the site and its goals, through sourcing appropriate content, designing the layout and look and feel, promoting the site, and ultimately measuring its success.

Along the way, the book introduces practical tips and tools that can be used, with easy instructions for marking up your content, styling it, and using CSS to lay it out. You'll see how to use tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code and Chrome DevTools to save time, and will discover how you can create responsive navbars and layouts, using flexbox and CSS grid, so your site works on any device.

The book introduces the core technologies of the internet, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with practical examples. You can use this as a starting point for building your website, or consider it valuable background information for understanding how the design principles are put into practice.

Whether you intend to build your site yourself or commission a freelance web designer, Web Design in Easy Steps gives you the knowledge you need to make sure your site is effective and easy to use.

The updated 7th edition of this book was published in April 2023.

Buy the book

Preview the book

The PDF sampler includes the covers, table of contents, index and Chapter 4 in its entirety. Chapter 4 covers layout and design, including defining your site's look and feel, creating a colour scheme, choosing fonts, planning a responsive design, using clean alignments, and organising information.

Download the PDF sampler

Review of the sixth edition

Software Latest: 4.5 out of 5 stars "Sean has a nice way of teaching... He is neither overly complex in his wording, nor condescendingly simplistic... This book covers a lot of material. For a 240 page book to be covering 15 chapters in such areas as Shopping Carts and Content Management Systems as well as promoting your website really blew me away... As such, this book does more than simply starting you off with a basic website... The book teaches foundation skills very well, but also dangles a few carrots for the user to research further. That, to me, is a fine way to tempt the reader's taste buds and encourage their future development. Illustrations are clear and in full colour, helping to drive home many of the points made in the book... If I had been given this book when I started out, then I'd have been designing and developing better sites in a much shorter period of time."

- Ben Avery, Software Latest

What's in the book?

The book's chapters are:

The web design challenge
Planning your website
Creating effective website content
Layout and design
Designing effective navigation
HTML: The language of the web
CSS: Giving your pages some style
CSS: Using CSS for layout
JavaScript for interactive pages
Tools for website design
Content management systems
Testing and launching
Promoting your website
Measuring Success

Supporting resources

View and download the example HTML, CSS and Javascript files from the book here. You can use these to avoid any typing errors, and to provide snippets of HTML CSS and Javascript code which you can incorporate into your website.

Here are some more articles on this site you might find useful:

Jakob Nielsen on why accessibility matters
Dummy content for your website - my Castle Fictoria web design exercise provides images and text you can use to create your first website
My guide to writing for the web
How to create a custom 404 error page for your website
How to make a favicon and Apple home screen icon
Free Javascript advent calendar for your website
Using Javascript to hide and show text and graphics

About the author

Sean McManus has been writing about business and technology for more than twenty-five years. He has written for magazines including Internet Magazine, Personal Computer World, Internet Works, Marketing Week, Start & Run Your Business, and Business 2.0. His websites have been featured editorially by The Times, The Daily Mirror, BBC Click and BBC Radio 2.

Credits

Visit www.sean.co.uk for free chapters from Sean's coding books (including Mission Python, Scratch Programming in Easy Steps and Coder Academy) and more!

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