When I get passionate about a topic, I tend to search for the best material I can find on it in order to expand my knowledge further. Web design is no exception and this list represents the books I have found to be very useful. These are all books that I have actually read and most of which are sitting on my bookshelf right now. This list is a follow up to my article “Buy, Borrow, or Steal the Best Books to Get Ahead.”

The links lead to the book’s amazon page and they have my associate id attached to them. Because I don’t have ads on this site I have to ask that if you like this list and decide to buy a book from amazon, please use my links as it would be helpful in paying for my coffee, book addiction, and future contests. Enjoy!

Typography

1. The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst

This is one of those books a lot of people with a background in graphics design loves. I think the language is way too exaggerated for a person without a graphics design background. I only include it in this list, because some of you might find that you like it since it has withstood the test of times, but I don’t recommend it for your first book on typography. Richard Rutter at webtypography.net took the elements in this book and applied it to the web very well. The site is a must read.

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• 1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
• 42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.
• 80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
• 70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
• 57 percent of new books are not read to completion. (1)

Of those who did read books, most read fiction strictly for pleasure. And the #1 selling book genre is “Romance,” which was read by 64.6 million Americans in 2005. (2)

Books + Online Resources > Online Resources

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The title of this article is still true even if you don’t want to be the best. By constantly working on yourself and improving little by little you will be able to get a whole lot better faster. The following articles pretty much covers a lot of the good resources available online to help you improve your skills.

50 Ways to Become a Better Designer

Stepping Up Your Skills: Areas for Continual Improvement as a Web Designer

On Designing a Better Blog Design

While online articles and resources are fantastic, there really is no substitute for a good book. Each month I give Amazon a huge chunk of my check in return for a bunch of books with that new smell. Yes, I smell my books when they arrive. Me and my UPS delivery man are on first name basis now as well. Here are some useful books I have read that will improve your blog design skills. I will write a more complete review of them in the coming weeks.

Design:

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

Typography:
Designing with Type: The Essential Guide to Typography (Designing With Type)

Usability

Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition

Color:

Color Design Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Using Color in Graphic Design

CSS:

The Art and Science of CSS

Photoshop:

The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques

This is a weekly feature where I will review books that I have read and think that will help readers either directly or indirectly in their conquest to increase their blog design skills.

“blogging heroes” by Michael A. Banks

This is my second book that I have read about blogging. Both books utilizes interviews in order to get a deeper understanding of the blogosphere. Blogging heroes takes it a step further and interviews 30 of the most influential bloggers, including Engadget, Boing-boing, Lifehacker, and so on.

While it is definitely interesting to see how different each person started blogging and how they came to their level of success, there is a lot of repetition in what they say during the interviews. That is a good thing, because they all agree that the best way to drive traffic and build a blog up is to be passionate about your topic, write high quality content, and post consistently. That is about the only thing they agree on though.

When it comes to how to promote a blog, there is a wide variety of different opinions. It seems to me that the bloggers who started years earlier don’t believe in SEO, while the newer bloggers rave about the effects of SEO. This is probably due to the change in the blogosphere as there are estimates that 80,000 new blogs pop up everyday.

In conclusion, the book is worth a read, but definitely not something you would read straight through. I would just recommend picking your favorite bloggers and read their story first, then read the rest when you got some time or just put it back on the store’s book shelf.

Google Analytics 2.0 by Jerri L. Ledford , Mary E. Tyler

Before reading this book, I didn’t even think anyone could write a whole book about a free service that looked pretty simple to understand. I mean, hey all you need to know is how many people visit the site and from where, right? Wrong! Read along and I will tell you what I learned.

I think by now a lot of people have heard about google’s free service to track information about your website. Perhaps you even already have it installed. I think most people would agree that statistics are important. That and its just fun to see the number of visitors, especially when they are increasing. But beyond the number of visitors, I didn’t care about much else. Mostly due to not knowing what they stood for or just thinking they didn’t matter much.

Well let me just say that after reading 300 or so pages about google analytics, I have a very different opinion on the matter. I had google analytics installed before on other websites, but I didn’t know about all the features it had or what was really important to track or even how to use its more advance features.

What is in the book

This book pretty much covers anything you need to know about google analytics. It goes into the different ways you can track how a visitor visits your website, the pages they click through in order to get somewhere, and how to track if visitors are reaching your goal or not. Your goal being different depending on what type of website you run. The book goes over how to track these different goals for ecommerce websites and content websites. By using these different tracking methods, you will be able to understand how to improve your website.

For example if you are running a content website where you want the visitors to spend as much time as possible on your website then by knowing all this information google analytics gives you. You will be able to understand how a person navigates the website, what they are likely to click on, what interests them, and what makes them stay or what makes them leave. Then you can take that information and change the website’s navigation to better suit your visitor’s needs and provide content they like more.

Conclusion

The only problem I have with this book is that the last few chapters are pretty much fluff as they are redundant, but useful as a quick reference I suppose. The only other thing is that I couldn’t find how to track how many times people downloaded something. I found out by using the help section in google analytics though. Here is the link if you want to track downloads.

Other than that, this book would be helpful to anyone who wants to understand how their website is being used on a deeper level and if the changes they made to their website have the impact they wish. I highly recommend this book, great to have on the shelf until you master google analytics. I will try to review a book that will help improve both of our repertoire of skills once a week around this time.