Book Review: Web Designer?S Guide To Wordpress

[Saint_Michael 3]

 

In keeping up with reviewing Wordpress books, I have another book that I would like to talk about and it is called “Web Designer’s Guide to Wordpress” by Jesse Friedman and if you read my Wordpress: Missing Manual Review I am a person who has gone beyond the basics of Wordpress and want to design Wordpress templates. That is where this book comes in as this picks up where The Missing Manual book left off and gets your hands dirty right away. One thing I like about this book is that it sections off the Wordpress template quite nicely and it should because Wordpress is a bit complex and each section of Wordpress like the Header, Sidebar, Footer, Pages, and navigation each have a specific focus with very specific needs. In short you have to understand how they function independently first and then once you do that you can begin learning how they function together. Sure, you can skip all that and plug the code in and get a fancy website up and running. However, with HTMl5 being the new king of web design, you kind of have to take a few steps back and relearn everything. Yes, I know, for some they are Gods of coding and pointing and laughing so this guy is a moron, but if you want to design a website the right way and with the least amount of problems I hope you think about my words for a second. Though, I will point out that you can still use XHTML as most of the code you will be dealing with will be in PHP.

 

With that in mind, let’s talk about the book. Friedman does, in my opinion, a good job breaking down everything and more importantly giving the reader ample time to learn about them. It is not a tell-all book or a Bible not at 271 pages but it gives you enough information to work with and get a Wordpress template up and running in no time. Interesting note about this book is he provides a chapter on working with Responsive Design. He doesn’t go too deep about the topic but from reading this particular chapter is that you need to take a cautionary approach with designing a Responsive Wordpress template because of Wordpress interprets HTML. I would think most Wordpress designers would agree that more time is needed when putting a Responsive layout together just because it doesn’t take much to break a website that is controlled mostly by PHP.

 

Overall, this is a good starting book to start designing Wordpress themes and obviously there are quite a few books out that cover this topic. Nonetheless, this book is small enough to prevent you from scratching your head or making things more complicated than they need be. It’s a good easy ready but if you’re looking for more technical stuff Wrox’s Wordpress books will provide that.