Book Review: Blog Design Solutions
February 28, 2006
Welcome to the world of modern web design!
This is a very good book on blogs. OK, so why should web designers want to read a book on installing and customizing popular blogs?
The anwer: web designers today, NEED to learn how to work with blogs. Blog implementation (installing, customizing, skinning) is a growing part of the web design business these days and is now an essential tool in the web designers toolbox.
Blog Design Solutions gives you a to-the-point tour of several important blogging engines:
- Moveable Type
- TextPattern
- ExpressionEngine
- WordPress
The is a multi-author book where each blog is given its due by one or more authors – as such, you know that each blog is covered by people who know what they’re doing.
Along the way, you will also pick up tips about Flikr integration, blog syndication and other things that this old time web designer may have not been ‘up to snuff’ on.
I use WordPress, and so I immediately jumped to that chapter; I found the writing to be clear, and the author covered topics that I wanted to read about. I am not a user of the other blog engines, but I’m glad that the book covers them for sake of comparison – it’s always good to know about competing products.
Beyond covering the blogs, the last chapter actually takes you step-by-step through the process of creating a blog from scratch using PHP. I went through the code, and enjoyed the way the author runs through the process – you’ll might also pick up a few PHP ideas along the way.
I recommend this book to any web designer who has the intention of earning a living in web design.
Stefan Mischook (The Web Design Heretic)
