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Summary: A Great Developer Guide
Review: This is an excellent book that teaches about styles and contents. I find it very helpful for deciding how to provide quality information on my client Web sites. What can be improved about this book is a good discussion on RSS, the tool that get your site contents syndicated and distributed on the Web instantaneously. I also recommend "Free Prize Inside" and "101 Ways to Boost Your Web Traffic, 3rd Edition." These two books address the missing points in the book.
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Summary: An appeal to sanity in creating meaningful Web content
Review: Too much, far too much content on the Web is not presented in a way that makes use of the media the way it is meant to be used. I have been guilty of this myself and soon realized that a different approach to writing and presenting content on the Web was essential. Since reading this book eagerly from cover to cover I soon realized the wisdom of the approach presented by Gerry McGovern and Rob Norton. Less is more! Yes! Drill down to the facts and the heart of your Web content. I'm looking for information, don't waste my time with pretty colors and graphics, I want to learn! This book has inspired me and given me a new attitude to my work - I teach System Analysis and Design at the University of Regina. My students now use this book in my classes! They tell me this book has been invaluable in creating effective Web sites for clients as part of their term project. I have observed that the extent to which the Internet has penetrated organizations has outstripped our understanding of the effective use of the technology. This book resolves that conundrum. You won't go wrong in buying this book.
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Summary: Market Researchers Should Read This Book
Review: Usability is a growth area for marketing research and all market researchers will find this a valueable read. For its essence is the very essence of marketing research namely that sucessful businesses are the ones that make an effort to understand the needs of the customer and give primacy to understanding their customers experience. All marketers will applaud his central thesis that in a publishing media, such as the web, it is not the content that is all-important, as is so often stated, but rather the one using the content. "In business the customer is king ... (and) if the reader is king then content serves the reader. (Yet) It's a strange and fascinating thing how easily content gets disassociated from its reader. There are billions of documents on the Internet today. A great many of them were not written with the reader in mind. They are boring, too long, verbose, incoherent, misleading out-of-date, unreadable". In short publishers who are not customer focused and who do not make the reader king will fail to get a return on their online investment. Like all McGovern's work this book comes highly recommended.
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Summary: Because people read on the Web
Review: Writing for the Web is not the same as writing for print because people read differently on the Web.
Every Web writer and designer needs to learn from the standards, rules and insights that this book delivers. It's the first book that understands that the number one thing people do on the Web is reading.
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Summary: May Help Justify Editorial/Web Content Budgets
Review: Written by two guys with real-world tech publishing credentials, this book takes a serious look at the role of quality content and what it takes present it on the web. They make a couple good points:
1. Quality content can create competitive advantage
2. Quality content is difficult and expensive to create. The best point in the book came early in the first chapter: In an information society, we are all involved in publishing -- whether we are writing an article, a marketing pitch or a sales report. McGovern and Norton make a case for an organization taking its publishing role seriously and creating systems for documenting, improving and sharing the information to foster business relationships and gain competitive advantage. And while the book lays out the structure required for managing content organizationally, it falls short of lessons or examples of how to do it. They highlight the basics - know the reader, create a publishing strategy, follow an editorial process, and build in ways to measure your success. For anyone with a background in publishing it's rehash. The book is best suited for educating business managers who don't have a publishing background, providing them with a brief understanding of the process and the rational to justify budgeting for the staff required to produce quality content. If you're new to content, it may be worth a read.
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