Customer Reviews

The Unusually Useful Web Book

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

By M. Todd Lassich
Bishop Eastern Sierra Macintosh User Group (beSMUG)

People spend months and even years learning and staying current with the technical aspects of web design. Armed with this vast knowledge--so vast it intimidates many from even taking these first steps--they head out in to cyberspace to set up shop, only to produce an ugly site with a clunky interface that no one visits.

If only they had started with the Unusually Useful Web Book. Indeed, if only I had. This is one book about web site creation, management and promotion that lives up to its name.

Unlike so many in this genre, this book takes you step-by-step through planning, creation and promotion and examines every known trick of of the world's most successful websites. This book is subtitled "Everything We've Learned About Why Sites Succeed!" and as such is less about the technical details of site design and maintenance as it is about the goals you should be shooting for, giving the aspiring webmaster a complete roadmap--prioritized--to the creation of a successful site.

I often spend a tremendous amount of time making sure the technical aspects of my designs work as planned. In so doing, it's easy to forget that the goal of designing a site is to attract visitors and hopefully, business. What I like most about this book is the way it makes me examine these priorities, and really helps on deciding whether adding this bell or that whistle to my designs is simply an effort to show off my skills, or whether they will be a useful, attractive enhancement that will encourage visitors to return.

From planning your site through building, visual design, marketing and hitting your target audience, to sizing up your competition and learning from them, making money, maintaining and updating your site, this book covers all the bases.

The book frequently encourages you to "Take Action!" with step-by-step sidebars and checklists to solve specific problems, such as visitors leaving your site without buying, getting higher up on the search engines, avoiding traps that lead to slow pages and difficult navigation and so much more.

I recommend this easy-to-read book for beginners and seasoned designers alike. In fact, this book is the best starting point and reference I've seen for anyone who thinks they might ever be interested in online marketing.

-...

The Unusually Useful Web Book could have been titled The Book You Must Read To Help You Plan, Design, Build, and Maintain A Successful Web Site. Everyone who is on a team developing or maintaining a web site should read this book and then re-read it frequently to keep the information and lessons fresh. I will definitely use this book to help me with my future web projects.

This book provides an overview of the processes, the techniques, and the technologies that can (and should) be used to develop and maintain a successful web site. If you are looking for an in-depth technical book on HTML, CSS, or other specific tools this is not that book. Buy this book anyway! It will be worth it.

The book is divided into four major sections: Planning Your Site, Designing Your Site, Building Your Site, and Maintaining Your Site. There is also an appendix with short biographies of the experts that the author interviewed and some additional expert advice. Each section has good information that you can use right now whether you are starting to create a new site or are involved in the maintenance and upgrade of an existing site.

There are some great features to go along with the great information. The book has 19 worksheets (the back cover says 20 so maybe I missed one) to help you with tasks such as: determining the site's goals, determining the site's features, improving site speed, browser/platform compatibility, and how you will promote the site. There are one-to-two page "Lesson from the Trenches" sub-sections that present the experience of web development veterans. Three lessons that stand out in my mind are: You are not your user, Your site is not the center of the user's universe, and Why you should follow web standards. Two other features are the "links" that point to other sections with more in-depth information about a topic and the references to on-line resources.

A conscious effort was made to make the book look and feel like a web site. This approach works very well. Sections are short, important points are highlighted, and I found myself following "links" to more in-depth information on topics that were of interest to me. This book lives up to its title by being full of unusually useful information and also being unusually readable. I think this book is going to be an instant classic.

I see this as an attempt to have an all-in-one quick reference book on issues relating to managing a commercial website. This book is packed tight with loads of very useful information and things to consider. It thus covers a lot of ground, from planning and design issues to technical issues (from file compression to XML) and usability and marketing issues. With so many areas covered, the material is necessarily brief, mostly in the form of summaries, points, and lists. A beginner may find some things hard to follow, since the book does not go into detailed explanations. However, it would still be useful for a beginner as it gives a good overview on most of the skills required to manage a website.

I would recommend this book to a wide audience, including
- beginners in web-related activities (great eye-opener and good introductory material to other important areas)
- students or fresh graduates (who think they know everything about HTML and other technology but are lacking in other issues)
- teachers who teach students web technology (and miss out the other issues)
- managers in charge of websites (who think think they know everything because they surf the internet)

A great well-rounded book which covers wider issues than almost any other web book.

I came across this book in my quest to build a web as a newbie. After slogging through how to books on dreamweaver, HTML,SQL and PHP this was certainly an easy read. If you want technical knowledge on the actual code to build a site, this isn't the place ( although all the basics are explained), but it is chocked full of interesting things to consider from the design angle and what works and what doesn't.

The book explains in clear terms the various components of how a web site works from aquiring a domain name, how pages are written, scripts,flash, which design elements have been proven to work, understanding user needs, designing for fast page loading, revenue models for making money, monitoring and measuring traffic, promoting your site, etc.


I would say this book is aimed at someone who wants to build or improve their site and hasn't needs a place to start that will explain the technical jargon and best practices based on real world situations. The beauty of this approach is that that its all covered - many of the other books Ive read simply assume prior knowledge. Its enough to give you a good understanding of the concepts with plenty of references to follow if you want to get into more detail on any certain topic.

Congratulations to the author and to the New Riders Publishing staff for bringing the book "The Unusually Useful Web Book" into being. June Cohen truly "got it right" with this publication of many years of distilled knowledge and wisdom relating to Web site planning, creation, and maintenance.

The book is truly jam-packed with highly useful, well organized, and clearly explained 'nuggets of information' for all levels of readers to both appreciate and to conscientiously apply toward their own Web site design and development efforts.

I was immediately pleased by its overall content, logical organization, its many illustrative graphics and tabular checklists, the many signposts within each subsection, the tone of the author's writing, and the inclusion of supporting statements by numerous experts in their respective areas related to Web site design and development.

One of the true strengths of this book is its applicability to all members of the Web site team coupled with its inherent emphasis on continual process improvement. June Cohen's wisdom is perhaps best exemplified by an acknowlegement that no Web site is ever truly finished. It only gets better or worse according to the receptivity toward and implementation of feedback from users.

Found this book so very helpful. Shed light on blind spots in my planning that I wasn't even aware that I had, and therefore saved me catch-up work later. Also, showed me that I do a lot by instinct; but some things I wasn't consciously planning and that when I do, the outcome is far more thorough. It really guided me when creating my own site, step-by-step. The author is clearly experienced and intelligent, as evidenced throughout. Grateful me. (I am a web designer, consultant; and have my own site/business online as well.)

Terrific book. Used it in my classroom since it was first published. Students love it because it is a quick and comprehendible read. Experts sited are still industry leaders today. Just sad it was published in 2004. I particularly like the forms it provides to help the web designer plan his/her site. Her handling of marketing related topics is exceptional. It really needs an updated edition. June, please update it. Hate to lose this book.

As a web developer, I got this book for my partner as we were going to do a relaunch of one of my sites.

However, I got the most out of it, because I filled in all the worksheets, to codify and collect my thoughts. I had all the ideas in my head, but it was hard for others to grasp until they could see the work sheets.

I have a couple other web design books, like Dummies, but this one is hands down more in-depth, and step-by-step in how to DESIGN your website. The other trailed off into steps on how to do CSS etc. The "Unusually Useful Web Book" is best used to organize your thoughts, and be able to articulate Scope, Goal, Target Audience Analysis, and Implementation Plan.

As a project manager for Microsoft, this book follows industry-standard methodology. It exactly met my expectations for being the step-by-step guide for the Planning part of Project Management, but specifically detailed for web design.

I read the comments about it seeming to jump all over the place, (more suited a web format), but I enjoyed the off-page references. I liked being able to see the thread of 'progressive elaboration', (how one thought morphs as is it is re-used at different stages). Personally, I liked the book's organization, and am considering copying the format (of lecture, work sheet, with tip boxes) for a work book I am writing on living out your career development plan.

This book works for those who like copying the success of others through repeatable methodology, for: forming a team; covering all the roles thatare needed; setting your vision; and doing it. Overall, it saved us months of development time. This is a book I leant out so many times, I can't find it anymore. Would like it back, as this really is my reference bible for web design.

I have shelves full of web manuals. This book is one of the first I grab when I need help and/or I'm frustrated/stuck.

It's illustrated with silly cartoons that make you chuckle (which takes your mind off your web problem for the moment, and gives you space to let new ideas in). It's got fill-in-forms to guide your progress (you can photocopy them so you don't have to write in the book). It's cohesive and easy to find things in it - FANTASTIC index! The BEST thing is the list of "top 10 reasons web sites fail".

I think this is ONE of the BEST books I have purchased to help me learn new web stuff, and fix old web stuff.

This book is aimed at "web producers" whom the author defines as "anyone who bears the primary responsibility for a site's success" (3). As a hobbyist web site operator who fits that description, I was at first confused by reading what the book was NOT vis-à-vis its table of contents, the four parts of which (Planning, Designing, Building, and Maintaining a site) seem to indicate a technical manual. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the technical aspects (xml, Javascript, Active Server Pages, Hypertext PreProcessing with PHP, and so on) are briefly defined so readers understand where they might fit in a site's operation, but the book focuses on why a "producer" might use such technologies and what other experts have learned about them. So it's accurate to say that the book covers a great deal of territory from the perspective of the person with ultimate responsibility for the site rather than from any single but necessary builder, like graphic designer, coder, database engineer, or quality assurance engineer.

The reason the book works so well as a reference manual for "producers" is that the author uses data gathered from 49 different web experts to support her choices for what to do in each of the four phases of web site development. Cohen herself has over a decade of experience in web design and support, from jobs at Stanford University to the commercial Hotwired.com site, where she was VP of Content. Since she knows many of these experts as colleagues, she is able to include page-length interviews from many of them on specific points, like "the top 10 reasons web sites fail," "the biggest mistake web sites make," and "50 ways to increase site traffic." Each chapter has several such interviews, which are reinforced by the summary worksheets at most chapters' ends. These sheets pose questions like "How will you improve your search engine rank?" and list check-boxed summaries of the chapter's points to use as a guide for action.

The chief value of the data provided by the author and her experts is that they eliminate guessing. Since nearly everything on the web can be counted (number of page visits, where visitors came from, number of times particular links are clicked or pages are viewed, and so forth), these data show what has worked for sites with millions of visitors. For instance, sometimes particular words--like FREE or MORE--on the home page increase traffic, and these experts have the before-and-after statistics to show how much. So "producers" can be pretty sure that by following advice in the book, they will improve their sites. It's given me at least a half-dozen ways for improving my hobby site, and none will cost money!

Because it covers so much information, the book might intimidate readers with little website background in the same way a dictionary can intimidate most of us by showing how few words we know out of the total. But especially for those people whose sites are necessary to their jobs and therefore must work effectively and reliably, this reference book will serve as a very good starting point.