At first glance this book doesn’t appear to be much more than a collection of snapshots of various websites. However, you quickly realize that the true value of this book is in its organization of topics and the way that it presents all the various web design choices and options. The six main sections of the book focus on different ways you may choose to design your site – by type (blog, personal, photography, etc.), by design style (retro, minimalist, photographic, etc.), theme (nature, clouds, extreme, etc.), color, elements (rays, crests, stripes, etc.), and structure (tabs, zoom in, modules, etc.). Each subsection introduces that particular design choice with a few meaningful paragraphs, and explains the rationale beyond what particular effects that sites might want to convey. As already mentioned, there are plenty of site snapshots and illustrations that give examples of how to implement particular design choices in practice. As the title of this book suggests, these are just ideas – you won’t find much in-depth coverage of these design choices, and if you are looking for such material you might want to consult a different book. Each example in the book is accompanied with the URL of the particular site, so you can go ahead and explore it in a greater detail.

The ideal audience for this book would be a web developer with limited resources and a smallish number of projects. If you are interested in building just one or two sites for personal use, then this book might be overkill, but even then you might enjoy learning about various design ideas out there. A more ambitious web developer working on bigger and more trafficked sites can also get a few good ideas from this book, but for them website optimization using various sophisticated statistical techniques would be the primary design strategy.

The book is well designed, printed on a glossy paper, with nice-looking colorful website snapshots. Many of the snapshots are too small for any detailed inspection, but you can always go online and check them out directly.

Overall, this is very nice and informative web-design book.