I first met Brian years ago when in a training role. What we have here is his notes and thoughts developed from what he covered in training.

The author leads us through all the planning and thinking phases of the project. Who is it for? Why are you producing it? In fact why are you producing anything?

What is the need for the site from the user angle and from the corporate angle? How should you layout or design a page? What is the appropriate level of understanding and comprehension and reading ability of readers? How is this different from on screen reading to book reading? How do you layout or break up large chunks of text in to smaller chunks and design and structure linking pages. Which fonts should you use and what type sizes are good and which colours are right?

If you are planing such a project here is a book to lead you through all the planning phases. Out of 188 pages the first 90 that are dedicated to a desk based planning and thinking process. This is all good communication and design procedure. The final chapter even includes user assessment.

If you are new or inexperienced in planning such projects it will be useful, however much of it is fairly basic for experienced technical writers. But then this it was not written for them.

One cautionary note is the book was written a while ago and exclusively for an early version of ‘Front Page’ and will need interpretation on the application side for a more modern Windows environment using more recent software.