Title:: Creating Commercial Web Pages

Author:Laura Lemay & Brian K. Murphy

ISBN: 1-57521-126-2

Price 37.50 UKP

Disk CD included

I must admit that I was a little sceptical about this book. There are so many web and HTML books about. I have, however, been pleasantly surprised. The book is “another html book” in that it explains how to make web pages but much more it looks at making a whole web site for commercial use.

 

Some of the areas it looks at are on-line catalogues, customer support pages, web based surveys / questionnaires, taking money electronically, order tracking, employee directories, how to incorporate search engines and more things of use to business. There is plenty of advice on do’s and dont’s on sensible rather than exotic style. Also there are many references to sources and examples on the net. Also how to get your site listed in search engines. The book is well illustrated and the examples are clear. the examples are either real sites or in source form on the CD.

 

The book builds on simple techniques moving through to the more complex in what appears to be a sensible way. One of the more useful parts is a critique of several real web sites.

 

The practical advice on how to uses the sw on the CD. The CD contains several in each category of HMTL editors, CGI tools, Java tools, pearl, multimedia tools and utilities for win3.1,NT3.5 &4 and Mac. Whilst much of the sw on the CD is shareware or cut down free versions it will permit the user to set up a web site for just the cost of the book. By the time one has experimented one will know what sw to buy (if any). One very useful tool is WebTransit (OEM version). A tool that will take documents (word, lotus, wordperfect including images) and automatically translate them (to a set of rules) into a set of html pages with navigation buttons and hypertext links.

 

Whilst this book clearly explains the techniques of creating web pages it does stress that planning is very important. Indeed after a few hours using this book I stopped and started again this time with pencil and paper planning my web site and listing requirments.

 

I recommend this book to any small business, self employed person who wants do set up their own web pages it is all you need. I suppose the best way to sum up how this book looks at web design is to compare a teenager decorating a bedroom to a hotel room for a chain. I shall be using this book as a source book to help me with the ACCU web site.