Web Site Cookbook: Designing, Maintaining and Marketing

reviewed by Mike Swope

Pulp Mentor

If you've built even one web site, you've had questions. I've been building web sites for ten years, and I still have questions about how best to accomplish certain tasks. Unfortunately, I don't have friends with more experience that I can call on for an answer at a moment's notice. The Web Site Cookbook is the next best thing, filled with hundreds of practical and worldly tips and tricks that all web developers can begin using right off the shelf to make their sites more successful. I earmarked during my first read, no less than 30 pages relevant to my current web sites in development. This Web Site Cookbook will also prove useful for website owners and help them understand and appreciate the complexity and special skills required to build an effective web site.

Doug Addison presents his wisdom clearly and matter-of-factly. Though I expected the Web Site Cookbook to use a trite cookbook theme, it thankfully does not. It's all business. Like most books of this genre, the Web Site Cookbook opens with the basics and ends at a considerably advanced, but general level. The first five chapters discuss domain names and registration, web server platforms, site host selection, site planning and charting, page design and navigation, and formatting text, code and graphics. The remaining five chapters deal with content creation and delivery, visitor interaction, promotion and e-commerce, and site maintenance and troubleshooting. An ideal mentor, Doug's presentation is direct, worldly and practical.

Doug, however, does not intend for the Web Site Cookbook to be read linearly, from beginning to end. He understands that his readers will have varied experiences with web site development. So he presents his information in a problem-solution-discussion format. He has anticipated common questions readers will bring to his Cookbook and answers them. Some of the problems-solutions I earmarked during my first read of the Web Site Cookbook are:

•    Designing Pages for Advertisements
•    Creating Breadcrumb Links
•    Writing Standards-Compliant Web Pages
•    Including Dynamic Content in Static Pages
•    Disabling Image Download
•    Creating Watermarked Images on the Fly
•    Adding Preview Information to Links
•    Creating Effective Pop-Up Windows
•    Randomizing Text or Images
•    Generating Downloadable Files Automatically
•    Duplicating Form Field Data
•    Creating an HTML Newsletter
•    Generating Income from Traffic & Content
•    Handling Requests for Missing or Relocated Pages
•    Adding the Referring Page to a Form
•    Evaluating Your Site with Metrics

For most readers, using the Web Site Cookbook will be as if they have emailed Doug and he has responded to them with just the answer(s) they need.

What's Missing?

Doug Addison's Web Site Cookbook is a superb web site design and development general reference, but it sidesteps some of today's noteworthy web development technologies and trends. Specifically, cascading style sheets, blogs and open source applications.

Although Doug mentions cascading style sheets on several occasions, he does not discuss them in any depth. In fact, neither cascading style sheets or its abbreviation (CSS) or other derivative appears in the Web Site Cookbook's index! CSS has been a hot topic for web site design and development for more than two years, so it is somewhat surprising that Doug virtually ignores the technology that helps separate a site's content from its presentation. Along with limited discussion, Doug also provides little guidance for more study of CSS. More information about CSS would be helpful to Web Site Cookbook readers.

Doug also fails to discuss at any length any open source solutions in the Web Site Cookbook, though he has ample opportunity to do so. Open source communities seem to grow larger every day, and many fine web sites are built with code and applications provided by them. Though Doug discusses blogs and e-commerce, his discussions are narrow. Blogs are discussed in relation to RSS feeds and, though Doug mentions that a side-by-side comparison of blog resources follows in the See Also section, I could not find that section for further study (an omission, I believe). Many web developers may find open source blog software more than useful for entire sites and specific purposes, other than a "web log." So this omitted information may have been very useful to some readers.

Doug also fails to acknowledge the growing number of task-specific open source solutions available. For example, in the e-commerce chapter, Doug's discussion is limited to enabling SSL, disabling a form submit button after the first click, creating complex select menus and protecting sites from fraud. Though important, these things do not an e-commerce site make. Doug has assumed in this case that the reader has an e-commerce site. If this is the case, then the reader is likely familiar with these topics and has already dealt with the majority of them. The e-commerce discussion here might have better centered on solutions available, including those provided by the open source community, much like his discussion of server platforms and host selection in Chapter 1.

Somehow, too, while discussing open source solutions, Doug might also find a way to mention other task-specific solutions available for classified ads, auction sites, real estate sites, and more, and point readers to resources that may answer their questions if his Cookbook does not.

Final Serving

While the Web Site Cookbook is a great how-to book, the author himself notes that it is not the definitive how-to book for web design or development. It is, instead, a superb primer and a must-have reference for anyone having anything to do with building, launching or maintaining a web site. Doug Addison's wisdom is dead-on with practical, real-world experience, particularly in the early chapters. For the early chapters alone, I recommend this book to web site owners, so they have a better understanding and appreciation of the skilled and detailed work their designers, developers and webmasters do for them. With clear, concise writing, Doug wastes no space or words, and his Web Site Cookbook is an essential reference tool. Readers will undoubtedly find dozens of tips and tricks they can put to use immediately, just as I did.

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