Recommended Reading

Hidden on the Internet, scattered among billions of Web pages, are the clues to an incredible secret. For those who know the secret, the result is untold wealth. Each month, a small group of people - an elite club who have uncovered the mysteries of The AdSense Code - put their knowledge to use and receive checks for tens of thousands of dollars from Google. And untold numbers of additional site owners are regularly generating supplemental income via AdSense while they play, sleep and eat!

The AdSense Code is concise and very focused on the objective of revealing the proven online strategies to creating passive income with Google AdSense. The AdSense Code reveals hands-on solutions to many of the concerns and challenges faced by content publishers in their quest to attract targeted traffic, improve content relevance and increase responsiveness to AdSense ads - using easy and legitimate techniques that have worked for those who know the secrets. Google AdSense expert, Joel Comm, provides you with the keys you need to "crack" The AdSense Code and unlock the secrets to making money online.

If You Build It, Will They Come? 

Too many Web site owners work on the if-you-build-it-they-will-come model for their sites. Unfortunately, those eagerly anticipated users don't always come. A Web site remains a passive media with limited visibility until you actively promote it to others.

Web promotion is a challenging and laborious activity. The exponential growth of the Internet has further compounded this problem as more and more Web sites are being added daily. How can you beat the crowd and attract the largest possible traffic to your Web site? Internet and technology training expert Thomas Wong reveals the secrets used by top Internet promotion professionals in 101 WAYS TO BOOST YOUR WEB TRAFFIC. This powerful book spells out proven techniques that help you:

You'll probably want to read this book, or at least its individual chapters, straight through in the way you would read a novel. The plot here isn't much, but the authors like to describe their subjects in English, rather than with code examples or protocols you can follow on a keyboard. It's good reading, though it's sometimes muddled by digressions into Web sites with design budgets in excess of $500,000. People with budgets like that aren't going to be reading Dummies books to figure out how to set up their sites. You won't be disappointed if you're starting from zero, but expect to do further research.

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This guide segments discussions of Web usability into page, content, site, and intranet design. This breakdown skillfully isolates for the reader many subtly different challenges that are often mixed together in other discussions. For example, Nielsen addresses the requirements of viewing pages on varying monitor sizes separately from writing concise text for "scanability." Along the way, the author pulls no punches with his opinions, using phrases like "frames: just say no" to immediately make his feelings known. Fortunately, his advice is some of the best you'll find.

One of the unique aspects of this title is the use of actual statistics to buttress Nielsen's opinions on various techniques and technologies. He includes survey results on sizes of screens, types of queries submitted to search portals, response times by connection type, and more.

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The title of the book is its chief personal design premise. All of the tips, techniques, and examples presented revolve around users being able to surf merrily through a well-designed site with minimal cognitive strain. Readers will quickly come to agree with many of the book's assumptions, such as "We don't read pages--we scan them" and "We don't figure out how things work--we muddle through." Coming to grips with such hard facts sets the stage for Web design that then produces topnotch sites.

Using an attractive mix of full-color screen shots, cute cartoons and diagrams, and informative sidebars, the book keeps your attention and drives home some crucial points. Much of the content is devoted to proper use of conventions and content layout, and the "before and after" examples are superb. Topics such as the wise use of rollovers and usability testing are covered using a consistently practical approach.

This is the type of book you can blow through in a couple of evenings. But despite its conciseness, it will give you an expert's ability to judge Web design. You'll never form a first impression of a site in the same way again.

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