Posted: Sun, May 17, 2009
Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual
Review by Mark Kiddell
'Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual' is a very good guidebook, covering all you need to know to be able to make a website yourself, get it on the web, and market it.
Introduction
The book starts by giving a superb introduction to XHTML, how documents are built, and how they are displayed on your screen. It explains in layman's terms how to make web pages, and how to validate these pages so that they meet the standard that they are coded in
TMM presents the reader with a number of authoring solutions, from the basic notepad package, to freeware and shareware packages, right up to the more advanced Dreamweaver package. This includes short reviews for the most popular editors.
Clear explanations are provided showing the differences between different types of web editors, from colour coded notepad equivalents up to expensive WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors, which are often as easy as making a Microsoft Word document.
A section of the book explains how to get web hosting, your own domain name, and then how to upload your files to your hosting provider so that it can be seen on the Internet at your own personal URL. An explanation of what URL stands for is given as well.
Technicalities
In Part 2 of the book, the focus moves onto more technical aspects of the page, and how to format it so that not only does it look nicer, but it remains cross browser compatible. The section starts off covering fonts, special symbols (such ampersand and pound) and Cascading Style Sheets. It covers Images, ALT tags, image file formats and sizes, and software available for making your web graphics.
Surprisingly, due to how in-depth the book is at covering the basic principles, the book doesn't cover hyperlinks at all until page 207, allowing you to make more than one page and link them together.
Later on Multi-part pages are covered, using Server Side Includes, Frames and Templates allowing you to update one document which will then do the job of updating every page on your website. The book does not cover PHP.
Marketing
This is a great section of the book, it explains how to get in the search engines, the basics of how pages are ranked, how to see the results via web based statistics for your site, and how to use forms and mailing lists. It also covers one of my favourite tools, Google Webmaster Tools. Google Groups is also covered allowing you to add a forum to your website.
Making Money
The money making section covers Google Adsense, allowing you to advertise Google ads on your site, how to generate associate links with Amazon, setting up as a merchant with PayPal, and using PayPal's Merchant Tools.
One particularly useful thing is explained for small businesses, PayPal now offer a full shopping cart service, allowing you to provide a full purchasing system on your website yourself with minimal effort and effectively zero cost.
Javascript and added frills
Part 4 of the book moves on to Javascript, showing you how to add some interactivity to your site, including rollover images, expandable web pages (click the arrow to expand a section), fancy buttons, drop down menus, and multimedia. Flash is mentioned and used but not covered as a topic in the learning sense, instead it shows you how to embed existing Flash players to play your music or videos directly on your web pages. YouTube is also covered.
The last section of the book explains blogging and how to set a blog up for yourself. This is followed by useful Appendices that detail XHTML commands and provide links to all the useful tools, hosting providers and websites mentioned in the book.
Conclusion
'Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual' is highly recommended reading for the novice that is looking to make their own website from scratch with little to no knowledge. It also acts as a good reference book for web developers with good XHTML/Web knowledge and is worth reading for people at all skill levels.
"Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual" is written by Matthew MacDonald, and is published by O'Reilly.
The book is available at a RRP of £22.99, €24, $29.99.
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