Designing Easy-to-use Websites is much more than a conventional usability book, it's an attempt to make us rethink the entire Web design process. Instead of directly jumping into the fun stuff of design and layout, as most designers tend to do, Vanessa Donnelly advocates a much more structured approach to Web site development that includes analysis and design techniques that enable a Web development team to design usable websites.

The process she lays out is not unlike a well-run software development project (only with continuous updates). Based on her own extensive usability research, and experience as IBM's chief usability guru, Vanessa has compiled a comprehensive, high-level, uber-guide to creating high quality, scaleable, and maintainable Web sites.

Donnelly's thesis? Usability is much more than layout and link colors, it bubbles up naturally from a well-planned database- driven site using a content management system that scales well, raises productivity, and dramatically reduces operating budgets.

The idea is to plan for expansion early, and separate the different components of content into manageable, discrete chunks (content, layout, style, navigation, and classification) that all exist independently, and can be assembled using a database. The days of lone webmasters coding entire Web sites by hand are over. In order to succeed, today's e-business sites need a content management system, extensive up-front planning and usability testing throughout the entire development process.

The author first shows how the current ad-hoc one-HTML-page-at-a-time methods are not working, and can cause problems as sites scale. Maintenance, version control, access, archiving, deletion, and classification are all made more difficult and ad-hoc by using a manual process. By separating out the various components of Web sites into discrete orthogonal chunks, and using a structured approach to planning and deployment, you can avoid many of the problems static hand-coded Web sites are experiencing today. As these "first-generation" sites grow larger, the maintenance problems multiply and productivity suffers, and they become an unwieldly mess of broken links and outdated information.

The solution? A database flowing into templates of course.

Unlike Veen and Rosenfeld and any other authors I've seen, Donnelly shows the entire Web site development process, and puts each task into words and UML diagrams, making the entire process clear. Business, user, and content analysis examples are shown, plus requirements for content providers, UI engineers, info architects, and content managers, along with checklists of best practices along the way. Finally, the site requirements and a "clear understanding of the user tasks that must be supported" are transformed into information models using standard UML diagrams so popular in the software development industry.

The net result? Think of this book as a success engine, with handy success templates and best practices. While the entire process is more than most webmasters would undertake, the book gives you marvelous goals to shoot for, and provides inspiration for improvement. The size and scope of this book are so large that a full review is impossible to fit in this space (you'll just have to buy the book :), but this is an impressive effort to encapsulate the entire Web development and usability process in a logical way...

I agree that the Netherlands reviewer in that the title is a bit of a misnomer in the current design/usability climate. *However* I think this is an excellent book for that odd group in every enterprise known as "core development", "integration and strategy", "publishing and architecture" or what have you. Those who approach usability from the front end only are told straight up that you really need to develop your back-end systems, particularly your content management system, at the same time as your site in order for maximum efficiency and usability to happen. This kind of info is often left out when pundits discuss usability and ease-of-use -- it's unglamourous but absolutely vital -- and this book allows you to present your case to your boss in a very persuasive manner. Only complaints are the largish number of IBM services group plugs, but since the author works for IBM, I guess that's natural.

This book elevates designing web sites to the status of a science. I've read plenty of books telling me which colors to use and how to make things readable on a acreen. Most were interesting but focused on presentation. Designing a scalable and managable database-driven web site is not easy, but this book spells out the steps in a logical structure

It also links business processes directly to the construction of a web site. Content managemnent, ownership, classification, information modelling, workflow etc are all examined in detail.

If I have one criticism, it's that the section on XML standards could be expanded. These days, sharing content at the db level with other web sites is crucial to many businesses. The section on page 142 talks briefly and then refers you to more in-depth information online. I guess the author figured that XML is really a separate book.

If you have some heavy-lifting to do in terms of an industrial strength web site, spending a couple of days reading this book could save you a lot of time later addressing scalability and management issues. I've not seen another book like this.

RDW

Just to give you an idea, there are about 130 pages on website development concepts and about 175 on how to hire the right people on your web team. I am sure it is important to have the right people but I am not THAT sure. The writer obviously is. The whole book has 2 chapters on actually designing an easy-to-use website. This is not what I expect from a book with such a title. Buy Jacob Nielsens book, Designing Web Usability, to get a real sence of how to build a good site. The writer seems to have taken most information from his website as it is quoted many times in the appendix. Look at that site and you'll know a lot more for a lot less.

Well worth buying, this book does an excellent job of explaining why it's important that your Website is easy to use, and how you can design it to make it so. If you are planning to do business on the Web, this book is essential reading. The author has clearly thought through the issues and come up with a design approach which adresses them.