Author: Paul McFedries
Publisher: Alpha Books – 364 pages
Book Review by: Venkat Subramaniam

This book comes with a compact disk (CD) that has a lot of tools to help you build a better website in less time. It has cascading style sheets (CSS), HTML tags, JavaScripts, examples, templates, and other “goodies” to help get your website up and running.

Among other functionalities and features, this book gives you:

  1. Navigation strategies to help you build a user-friendly, searchable website
  2. Simple ways to incorporate news feeds, feedback forms, chat rooms, images, links, and video into your site
  3. Helpful advice for getting your site on key search engines
  4. Expert ways to make your site mobile-friendly
  5. Straightforward tips on automating, publishing, and publicizing your site
  6. A comprehensive explanation of how to sell ad space
  7. Idiot-proof instruction on hosting your own site

This book consists of five parts. Go to “Contents at a Glance” to get a quick overview of what is in it. Or go to “Contents” to get the details covered in all 17 chapters of this book.

Part 1 is “Building a Website with Your Bare Hands.” It gives you the building blocks of a website and the basic tags you need; how to design your site with tables; accessorizing your site with bulleted and numbered lists, news feeds, weather modules, and free content; and how to make your site more social, with forums, chat rooms, and bulletin boards.

Part 2 is “Designing Your Website.” You discover the elements of a good site design, with do’s and don’ts; site navigation essentials, to make it easy for your visitors to get around on your site; and how to configure your site for mobile browsers so that you make sure that mobile device users can access your site easily.

Part 3 is “Publishing Your Website.” Here you find out if your website is “up to snuff” and how to stamp out errors and gaffes before your site goes live; getting your site on the web so that the world sees your masterpiece; and how to host your own website with Window Vista’s Internet Information Services web server.

Part 4 is “Automating Your Website with JavaScripts.”  You learn what JavaScripts is and how to add those scripts to your website’s pages; and you get a lot of fun scripts that can put your pages into high gear.

Part 5 is “Turning Your Website Skills into Cash.” If you want to become a paid professional web designer, here’s where you learn how. You learn the tips and techniques on how to place ads on your site and make money from them; and how to work with affiliate programs and make money from them as well. You also learn how to sell products and services on your site through the power of e-commerce.

This guide provides you in the Appendix a Glossary of terms to enable you to learn computer lingo; a list of the contents of the CD included in the book; an Index; and an About the Author.

The author Paul McFedries has sold more than 60 books with a total of more than three million copies worldwide. That’s a lot of books! Many of these books are Idiot’s Guides. A lover of words, he owns a website – www.WordSpy.com – that has more than one million page views a month. He and his work have been mentioned in several publications including The New York Times, Time, and The Wall Street Journal.     

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Website is an indispensable and comprehensive book on creating a great website that can get a lot of traffic to it. I highly recommend anyone serious about putting their business online to get a copy of this book, read it and keep it as an important reference tool. It contains a lot for information that you will need to look up from time to time to constantly improve your online business.