Preface

Web Site Cookbook is about building web sites that people will visit, use, bookmark, and revisit. It is the book I wish I had when I started building my first web site almost 10 years agoa one-stop source for answers to the questions that come up when building a web site. In it, 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.

Rather than being the authoritative volume on how to be a webmaster, web designer, web developer, or expert in any of the Internet's myriad technologies, acronyms, or buzzwords, the Web Site Cookbook instead shows you how all of those disciplines (and others) can be combined for a common purpose: serving and engagingeven delightingan audience of visitors to your site. Without them, of course, your efforts will be for naught.

Producing and maintaining a web site requires both halves of your brain, as well as a closet full of hats for assuming the various roles you will take on to ensure the web site's success. In the course of bringing a site to life, you might find yourself playing strategic planner, interface designer, programmer, database administrator, quality assurance manager, and promotional guruoften in the same week. That's why this book strives to present a wide range of design-, coding-, and marketing-oriented solutions to real-life problems that come up regularly when creating and growing a web site.

Do not feel compelled to read this book from start to finish. Unless you're just getting started building web sites, you may find that your own knowledge will serve you just as well as the recipes on that subject. (But remember, even a gourmet chef needs a refresher now and then.) This book is intended to be a ready reference for the site builder who needs a quick solution to an immediate problem that falls outside of his area of expertise. For example, the designer who needs a crash course in document types or setting up a cron job, the programmer who needs advice on choosing a color scheme or clip art for a site, or the marketer who wants to set up a weblog or email newsletter.

Regardless of your abilities or the role you play in building a site, you share a common trait with millions of other people building and publishing web sites: you have a message in need of an audience and want to find that audience on the Internet. The Web Site Cookbook 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.