Programmers have made use of patterns for a long time. Patterns provide a way to tackle a problem that has been solved before. They provide a framework for problem solving. Now web designers can utilize that same workflow theory as explained in The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web Sites (2nd Edition) by Douglas K. van Duyne, James A. Landay and Jason I. Hong. This book goes a long way towards providing designers with a reference for solving web design problems and a process tool for discovering web site useabilty solutions.
The book is broken down into chapters that solve various patterns of design. It begins by defining Site Genres. The site genres they have defined are Personal E-Commerce, News Mosaics, Community Governance, Self-Service Government, Nonprofits as Networks of Help, Grassroots Information Sites, Valuable Company Sites, Educational Forums, Stimulating Arts and Entertainment, Web Apps that Work, Enabling Intranets and Blogs. With each genre a problem is described and then solutions are presented. For example for Personal E-Commerce the problem is:
Customers appreciate the convenience of ordering online, but if a site is cumbersome, is veiled about its pricing and policies, or does not seem to provide a personal benefit, they leave.
There are a lot of images that show websites that have found solutions to the problems. L.L. Bean and Amazon are pictured in this example as sites that have solved this genre.
The Design of Sites covers a lot of ground and is a handy resource to have on your bookshelf if you design websites. Chapters that I found interesting are Creating a Navigation Framework, Helping Customers Complete Tasks and Making Navigation Easy.
While at times I thought what they were describing was very obvious, it makes sense for a volume that is a definitive resource on its subject to cover everything. This volume makes the attempt and does a good job of organizing the data so you can find it. It even has an appendix of terms in the back. Iwas pleased to find that the subject of content was approached throughout and it emphasized the importance of content, and how best to display content for the various sites targeted users.
While not a book about Information Architecture, the book does cover the importance of procedure and having good quality analysis and diagrams to begin with. The first four chapters cover those aspects even before getting into the various patterns of design. The process they preach is to create Customer-Centered Sites.
I found the book to be extremely helpful. While much of what I read I already knew, it was nice to have it all cohesively described into a resource. Books like this can get old fairly quickly as the examples get replaced with newly redesigned websites. I think the basic concepts presented here are very enduring.
