The Unusually Useful Web Book

Rating:
Summary: Covers what the other books forgot--making successful sites
Review: 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.

-...

Rating:
Summary: Covers what the other books forgot--making successful sites
Review: 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.

-...

Rating:
Summary: Recipes for Web Site Success
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: But Who's it for?
Review: Friends of the writer will (have?) hyped the book. It's a good effort, but like nearly every book being flung out of pub houses on "web design" these days, it's 20% useful and 80% pure superficial crud. Nearly all of what's here is a rehash of what anyone with six months' experience already knows. It's *NOT* a book about "everything" to do with the web, or with web design, or with building web sites. Or anything.

Go to you local bookstore, check it out like you would any expensive-and-out-of-date-in-a-few-months computer book, pick up a tip or two, then put it back on the shelf. They recycle them eventually, you know.

Rating:
Summary: Unusually Useful about sums it up.
Review: 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.


Rating:
Summary: It *is* unusually useful... it really is!
Review: I couldn't believe how packed this book is with good information. So many other Web books cover one topic well and gloss over the rest. This one takes on everything Web producers and Web site owners need to consider, and gives practical, well-reasoned application methods. If it had been around a few years ago, perhaps the bubble wouldn't have burst. I'm looking forward to reading more from this author. If only she could write the Unusually Useful Guide to Dating....

Rating:
Summary: Pretty Useful (Almost) All-In-One Web Book
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Good for beginners, but it has problems...
Review: The book is a fairly thorough overview of the process of producing a website and how to make it better, but it suffers from several flaws. If you have done any reading on usability, a large part of this book is redundant. While it is admirable that the author stresses user-centered design, most of the information is available elsewhere, and covers only basic information.
The layout of this book makes it difficult to read also. The book is about web design, and this was carried over into the printing of the book as if it were on the web. I found so much bold text and other style elements to be distracting. A different layout would make this much more readable.
I found the organization of the book distracting as well. There were lots of references in the book to other areas in the book, I think they were going for an offline hyperlink style. I found the references annoying and it left me wondering why the organization wasn't changed to keep related material together. The table of contents was very thorough, and if I had really wanted to find related information, I would have looked it up in the toc.
Some of the information appeared to be filler and was so basic even a novice would know it if they had used the Internet more than once or twice.
On the plus side, there are a number of good ideas presented by the book, not all of them glaringly obvious. In particular, I thought the chapters on increasing site traffic, promoting the site, and search engines were worthwhile and covered ground that's not intuitively gained.
Overall, I would recommend that only absolute beginners buy this book, most of it you will pick up while you are working and surfing. If you have more than a couple month's experience, find a different book, this one won't teach you much you didn't already know.

Rating:
Summary: An instant classic!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Review of the Unusually Useful Web Book
Review: 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.