| Blogging has moved rapidly from being a craze to become a core feature of the Internet--from individuals sharing their thoughts with the world via online diaries, through fans talking about their favorite sports teams or music, right up to serious business minds discussing industry futures.
And that includes you, right? If you haven't got a blog already, you want to start one, and want to find out how. If you have already got one, you want to know how to customize it, and make it look cooler than everybody else's. In either case, this is the ideal book for you.
In this book, a team of renowned web designers take you through the ins and outs of putting together great blogs. They waste no time harking on about the philosophy of blogs, or the community behind them. Instead, they get straight to the practical details, showing how to set up a basic blog in some of the world's most popular blogging engines -- Movable Type, ExpressionEngine, WordPress, and Textpattern. With your blog set up, they then show you how to build great looking, usable layouts for your blog. The last chapter even shows you how to build your very own PHP/MySQL-based blog engine!
About The Authors
Andy Budd is a user experience designer and web standards developer living and working in Brighton, England. As the creative director of web design consultancy Clearleft (www.clearleft.com), Andy enjoys building attractive, accessible, and standards-compliant websites. His online home can be found at www.andybudd.com, in which he writes about modern web design practices.
Andy is a regular speaker at international design conferences, workshops, and training events, as well as organizing the UK’s first web 2.0 conference (www.dconstruct.org). Passionate about the quality of education in the industry, Andy runs SkillSwap (www.skillswap.org), a free community training and networking project. Andy also helped set up the Web Standards Awards (www.webstandardsawards.com), a project that aims to recognize websites for their use of web standards.
Simon Collison is Lead Web Developer at Agenzia (www.agenzia. co.uk), and has worked on numerous web projects for record labels, high-profile recording artists, and leading visual artists and illustrators, including The Libertines, Black Convoy, and Project Facade. Simon also oversees a production line of business, community, and voluntary sector websites, and passionately ensures that everything he builds is accessible, usable, and complies with current web standards. Simon regularly reviews CSS-based websites for Stylegala and does his best to keep his highly popular blog (www.collylogic.com) updated with noise about web standards, music, film, travels, and more web standards.
On those rare occasions away from the computer, Simon can be found in the pub or trying to con free gig tickets out of his clients. A little too obsessed with music, he is very likely to bore you with his latest musical Top 100 or give you a potted history of the UK indie/ alternative scene from 1979 to the present day. |
