Web Site Cookbook: Solutions & Examples for Building and Administering Your Web Site

by Doug Addison

Book Overview

The total number of web pages today has been estimated at over 3 billion, spanning millions of individual websites. Not surprisingly, there is tremendous pressure on web developers and designers to remain current with the latest technologies.

The Web Site Cookbook from O'Reilly covers all the essential skills that you need to create engaging, visitor-friendly websites. It helps you with the practical issues surrounding their inception,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596101090
• ISBN13: 9780596101091
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 279 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Web Site Cookbook

Web Site Cookbook is a really good problem solving guide for beginner to intermediate web designers. This reference includes hundreds of common questions, how tos, and ways to increase efficiency in a standard problem, solution, discussion, and see also format. Each of these entries also uses snippets of text and often includes illustrations of the result whenever possible. Topics include everything from registering and site planning through formatting text and graphics to making forms and dealing with ecommerce issues. Web Site Cookbook is set up from simple to more complex concepts so that the reader need not have any previous experience creating a website in order to comprehend and make use of these instructions. Furthermore, the quick and easy access of the problem-solution format of the entries will be particularly helpful to web designers looking for particular solutions, wanting to upgrade their skills, or just wanting to learn a few new techniques to improve their site.

COOKING ON YOUR WEB SITE!!!

Are you a web developer and designer? If you are, then this book is for you! Author Doug Addison, has done an outstanding job of writing a book about building web sites that people will visit, use, bookmark, and revisit. Addison, begins by untangling the choices that confront web site builders during the process of getting a new web site off the ground. Then, the author discusses site planning and setup. Next, the author presented solutions that will help you balance aesthetics with usability. The author then focuses on the written content that, for the majority of sites, constitutes the meat and potatoes of their online offerings. He continues by covering a few of the most common issues surrounding the use of graphics on a web site, including how to choose the right ones and optimize them for a fast download. Then, the author looks at some techniques for using visual clues. He then goes over some of the little details that make a web site visit successful and enjoyable. Next, the author explains the trust-building techniques and fraud-avoidance maneuvers that help secure both sides in an online transaction. Finally, he discusses both the administrative tasks you should use to maintain your site, as well as the technical procedures you'll need to know to keep your site and your job trouble free. In this most excellent book you'll find solutions to everything from choosing, registering, and protecting a site's domain name to keep spammers from harvesting the addresses you display on its pages. More importantly, this book can lead the way in showing you how to publish a site that is not only a useful and attractive representation of the business, organization, or person behind it, but is also easy to build, maintain, and update.

Working on Web Sites in a Straight Forward Way

Doug Addison has produced a very useful and informative guide to working on Web sites. While many books look at the mechanics of HTML, or detailed coding, Web Site Cookbook rather follows the O'Reilly cookbook structure, looking at specific issues and needs and presenting answers. The book looks at the other aspects of good Web site work - colors, design and small tasks that are part of everyday Web sites now. Many of the recipes will make a more experienced Web site author go "duh," but I found myself flagging many of the entries if nothing else to do more research using some of the Web resources cited at the end of each recipe. Much of what is talked about is Web Design 101, but with so many WYSIWYG tools out there allowing anyone to produce a simple Web site, it's useful to have someone succinctly state the ideas behind complimentary colors to try and avoid those awful sites that just make your eyes burn. Nothing here is earth shattering or is something that you couldn't find on-line, but the value is Addison's organization and presentation, distilling Web speak into simple language, showing some examples and sending the reader off to other resources if he or she wants. The book is written with the idea that you are programming in PHP on top of an Apache Web server, which may not be relevant to all readers, but even those readers, like myself, who don't use PHP or Apache can carry away quick and valuable information, and have a flagged book to grab and look for information on a specific topic in the future. It's going to be a useful addition to my my desk.

Fine collection of practical Web site management information

What's refreshing about Addison's Web Site Cookbook, is that it's decidedly not a Martha Stewart Web Site Cookbook. In other words, you won't encounter loads of interesting, but esoteric and elusive online reference material that you're not likely to understand, let alone actually use on your site (Read: no blanched albino Peruvian endives here. But I digress...). Addison has put together a fine collection of practical, useful and downright helpful info for those charged with managing all aspects of a site. For Web denizens who've been at this for a while, you're still likely to find new material that can be readily applied to existing sites (say, the addition or favicons, or new PHP tools). For others, newer to Web site management, there are hosts of items that should save time in overall execution (i.e. flow charting processes, protecting images files/directories, naming conventions, etc.) by getting it right the first time.

So you don't learn the hard way too...

The author says this is the book he wished he'd had when he started building websites ten years ago. I agree. The book is structured as a series of problems posed, with solutions, a discussion, and related links for follow-up. Some of the problem/solution match-ups certainly sometimes read like notes kept handy after some bit of knowledge was learned the hard way. The book is written for those who make a living by designing, developing, maintaining, and marketing Web sites for themselves or other people. The exclusive focus is on the familiar world of LAMP -- Linux/Unix with Apache, MySQL, and PHP. The author shares lots of handy code snippets (mostly PHP) to deal with technical issues but he does not neglect the soft skills, such as approaching the information architecture of a proposed site -- and marketing the finished one. Addison goes into as much depth as is necessary to solve a problem and resists the temptation to go further. He clearly keeps up with best practices. I was impressed that his advice for a printer-friendly site is to use print media CSS. Most sites, even new ones, use more expensive and labor-intensive methods, like adding middle-layer software or creating separate content versions. Quibble: the book does not mention, nor do the publisher's or author's sites offer any way to download the code snippets and the lists of related links. That is very odd for a book of this nature and I hope the author corrects the oversight for readers soon.