Never fear a lack of information when looking for advice and guidance on designing a Web site. Web designers are a loquacious bunch, apparently eager to share their knowledge and experience. They write a lot of books and, of course, because they are Web designers, they like to create Web sites about creating Web sites.

My last three columns have provided basic information about Web site design and organization, but as you dive into a project, you will undoubtedly want more detailed advice on creating a site that best meets your company’s needs. The problem is finding the most useful sources among the multitudes. The following sources—books and Web sites—provide good information and common-sense advice on designing a Web site.

One of the best books around is the “Web Style Guide” (Yale University Press, 1999), which, unexpectedly, comes out of the Yale University School of Medicine. This is where Design Director Patrick Lynch has established a mini-industry of Web design, consisting of several Web sites, consulting services and the “Web Style Guide.” The book actually grew out of a highly respected Web site on site design created by Lynch as director of Yale’s Center for Advanced Instructional Media. The site (info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual) is basically an online version of the book.

The “Web Style Guide,” which Lynch co-wrote with Sarah Horton, multimedia specialist at Dartmouth College, applies classic design principles to the Web. The basic approach behind the style guide is to view Web page and site design “as a challenge that combines traditional editorial approaches to documents with graphic design, user interface design, information design and the technical authoring skills required to optimize the HTML code, graphics and text within Web pages.”

The book guides readers through the process of Web design, beginning with the site’s goals. It goes into detail about designing and organizing the Web site, applying basic design principles to Web pages, and using typography and graphics effectively. The authors address practical technical concerns of HTML and computer graphics formats, but they keep the explanations clear enough for the novice to understand. A second edition of the “Web Style Guide” is due out this fall.

Along with the book and its related Web site, Lynch operates several more Web sites, including the eponymous patricklynch.net. This contains Lynch’s occasionally written columns, which he calls visualLogic, on subjects such as enterprise identity and fundamentals of Web design. The site also contains a helpful annotated bibliography of references Lynch says he’s found most useful to his work as a Web designer. He also lists the software tools he uses in his work, as well as, links to a number of the Web sites he has designed for the Yale School of Medicine, valuable for their use as examples of good Web design. Among these is Web Design + Development, his internal Yale site (its.med.yale.edu/wdd/) offering visual and information design consulting services.

For a totally different viewpoint, try Jakob Nielsen’s site, useit.com. Nielsen, a former Sun Microsystems engineer, has gained some notoriety for his complete disdain of the use of graphics on the Web. “Download times rule the Web,” he explains on his Web site, “and since most users have access speeds on the order of 28.8 Kbps, Web pages can be no more than 3 KB if they are to download in one second, which is the required response time for hypertext navigation. Users do not keep their attention on the page if downloading exceeds 10 seconds, corresponding to 30 KB at modem speed. Keeping below these size limits rules out most graphics.”

So in keeping with that philosophy, Nielsen’s Web site has no graphic bells and whistles. It is straightforward text, presented clearly.

Nielsen first attracted attention with his iconoclastic Alertbox columns, included on his Web site, with titles such as The Top Ten Mistakes of Web Design, The End of Web Design, Did Poor Usability Kill E-Commerce, and First Rule of Usability? Don’t Listen to Users. His site also includes lists of recommended books and Web sites, news items and a plug for his book, “Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity” (New Riders Publishing, 1999). Nielsen provides the foreword in another useful book, “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web,” by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville (O’Reilly and Associates, 1998). “A Web site must grow from a carefully planned information architecture for users to be successful in finding pages and accomplishing tasks,” Nielsen writes in the foreword. “Confused users, lost users and dissatisfied users can quickly turn into no users.”

“Information Architecture” focuses on large-scale sites, but the information is applicable to small sites as well. The book is all about organizing information. It touches on graphic design, programming and related issues only as they affect the organization of content. It also explains different types of navigation, labeling and searching systems. The authors approach a complex topic with a casual style that makes even the most complicated explanations seem understandable.

Another useful book is “Great Web Architecture” (IDG Books Worldwide, 1999), which takes the approach of examining effective Web sites to see which design and architecture techniques work best. This book is colorfully illustrated with examples of actual Web sites. It looks at different types of sites—informational (CNN, Washington Post and Britannica, for example) and marketing (Patagonia, Dell and Apple, for example)—and examines how top sites establish an identity. It examines site structures, navigation, design elements, typography and multimedia, and includes tips and comments from several top Web designers.

From the school of learning from our mistakes comes another lighthearted, but useful source: WebPagesThatSuck.com, “where you learn good Web design by looking at bad Web design.” Consultant Vince Flanders created this Web site in 1996 when he was Webmaster for Lightspeed Net (now a part of Earthlink) and teaching classes in HTML. “My methodology is somewhat different,” he explains on the site. “I firmly believe that if a person is exposed to bad Web page design they’ll be less likely to use these techniques in the pages they create.”

WebPagesThatSuck.com features The Daily Sucker—an up-to-the-minute review of bad Web sites. The day I wrote this, the two featured sites were the Department of Defense’s Defense Technical Information Center and Nutshell, which sells leather cases for handheld computers. The Web site led to the publication of a book by the same name in 1998, with co-author Michael Willis. This in turn led to a new career in consulting and lecturing for Flanders, who recently launched another Web site called FixingYourWebSite.com.

Like the earlier site, this one takes an irreverent approach to the serious world of Web design. It contains a number of pertinent links and articles, with Flanders’ one-of-a-kind interpretation. He takes on, among others, Nielsen. “Jakob views the Web as this wonderful place where you can find information quickly and easily and the information comes directly to you and the Web is this one, big organic world where ‘we all get along.’ On the other hand, the artistic community views the Web as this wonderful artistic medium where ideas, beauty, and truth can be communicated in exciting, colorful, and innovative ways. Both sides have an idealistic view of the world. Both sides are wrong. The Web is like a strip mall in Monterey, Calif. For those of you unlucky enough to have never visited Monterey let me just say it’s a beautiful seaside town with loads of educational facilities, beautiful architecture, great restaurants—and a few, ugly strip malls. That’s the real Web—moments of beauty surrounded by ugliness and crass commercialism.”

And that about sums up the world of Web design.

Susan Holly is a freelance writer based on Sanibel.