So, the first review of DWN has come in on Amazon: 5 stars! Not a bad way to start off the Amazon.com listing for customer reviews of the book. I know I’m often very influenced by the first rating I see on Amazon.
It’s a short review and doesn’t really go into much depth or detail. The reviewer seems to like the layout and organization of the book. I’m glad she likes the fact that I cite others, something that wasn’t easy to juggle.
She also likes the abundance of screenshots, which was quite a lot of work–more than I planned for. I spent hours looking for appropriate examples on the web. And I didn’t want to keep using the same sites, so I ran out of ideas sometimes. Then, once you find a good example there are all kinds of other considerations, like how wide the page should be, what should be shown, and what portion of the screen should be used. And the images had to named and tracked properly for production. For some chapters, I spent as much time getting the screenshots together as writing the text. That doesn’t really show through, however, when you’re just flipping pages quickly, so it’s good to hear that someone appreciates the results of that work.
The reviewer cautions that the book isn’t for programmers. I mention this quite clearly in the preface as well. My first editor warned me that people might think it’s a book for developers. With a title like Designing Web Navigation I can’t imagine why. Coding a web page isn’t Design, now is it? How did it ever come to be that “web design” got equated with programming?
Anyway, thanks for to Ms Prosser for her favorable review on Amazon.com
EXPERIENCING INFORMATION 
RE>How did it ever come to be that “web design” got equated with programming?
We’ve been trained to think if the cover is white and has an animal on it, it’s a book for programmers.
Doh! Of course. Thanks for pointing that out, Victor. My collection of white covered books with animals on them consists of IA for the WWW, Ambient Findability, Myths of Innovation, Art of the PM, etc., so I personally don’t equate O’Reilly books with programming. But I can see how others easily would.