Putting Your Small Business on the Web (The Peachpit guide to webtop publishing) Book

Maria Langer has a good deal of real-life experience in setting up small-scale Web sites, and it shows. She knows that most businesses don't require an Amazon-style infrastructure and a million-pound database to keep things working, so instead she presents the wealth of low-budget options that are available to small companies, detailing the pros and cons of each approach. The book is full of examples of successful Internet companies that don't break the bank with their approach to e-commerce--and Langer uses their sites as examples to show you what you could do with your site. Not only are there many straight-out suggestions of what sorts of things a good business should have on its site, but the book asks pointed questions designed to get you thinking about what aspects of your business could be better served on the Web. Langer's style is concise and chatty, and the book's an easy read, stepping from Internet basics all the way up to analysing Web server logs in order to control traffic flow. Techno-babble is kept to a minimum, although in a book like this it's unavoidable. There are one or two incomprehensible paragraphs on subjects such as root server folders that might have been better served by a more comprehensive write-up, but it's nothing that will cripple your understanding of the topic. The section on hiring a Web site designer is a definite high point. Using a number of real-life examples of designer horror stories and bad Web sites to explain exactly why you want to be choosy in your selections, Langer goes on to tell you what questions you should ask prospective designers, how to tell when things are going wrong and when to pull the plug. There is one minor flaw: although she tells you over and over again that she's seen people get grievously ripped off by, she doesn't give you any sort of price range to tell you what's reasonable for any given service, which leaves you guessing when comparing site estimates. In case you don't want to hire a designer, though, she does an excellent job of posing the right questions to help you determine whether you should use someone from inside your company. The book does have its drawbacks. It suffers badly when it comes to getting your site listed on search engines--it barely mentions Yahoo! (a must-list for any business owner), and while it tells you about meta tags and key words, it doesn't provide specific details on which search engines use which tags. This book is a quick read, it's thoroughly informative and it's a good resource for the small-business owner who's looking to put that crucial "e" before his or her business name. --William Steinmetz, Amazon.comRead More