Complete Idiot's Guide to Creating a Web Page and Blog [Paperback]

The point of this book, as is true in general of the Complete Idiot's Guide series, is to give a gentle, non-intimidating, and often humorous introduction to its topic. It's meant to help people who really know nothing about the web and about blogging create something that looks nice and accomplishes whatever purpose they have in mind for it. And in this, I believe this book succeeds beautifully.

Since you can so easily find a listing of book topics in the information Amazon provides, I'll just mention some of the things that particularly caught my attention in this book. One of those was the section on blogs. None of the other HTML books I've read have discussed the issue (probably because this is the most recent of them, put out in 2004). Not only does McFedries get into the how of blogging, but he also gets deeply into the social and historical details. There's plenty of information on formatting, programs, services, etc., but there's also great stuff in here about finding and building your audience, focusing on a topic or two, deciding on your posting frequency, writing interesting entries, getting along with other bloggers, and so on. I read this section with rapt attention.

Some CIG and For Dummies books make the mistake of providing what I call "perishable resources." That is, they tell you about a couple of specific hosting providers or whatever. I refer to these as perishable because by the time you read the book those companies have probably shut down, been bought, or changed enough that everything is different. For the most part McFedries doesn't make that mistake. Instead he tries to tell you how to find this sort of information on the web yourself, so you'll be able to figure out who is most currently a good choice.

There's a chapter in here on "the elements of web page style." Before I got to this chapter I was a little worried (this is where that intro line about the review score comes in). There are a lot of sites out there on the web that go crazy with wild fonts, bold and italics all over the place, frobbies that only work on one browser type or another, lots of huge images that take forever to load, horrid noises that play without asking first and scare your cats off of your lap (okay, I have some personal pet peeves here), and so on, and it seemed to me like all of McFedries' enthusiasm for the web tools at one's disposal could contribute to that. But then he wrote this wonderful chapter in which he explains things to help you make your web page appeal to visitors, and he covers a lot of these things in there.

I think this is a fantastic introduction to web site and blog creation--in particular the wide world of blogging, since there are so few other resources on that subject. I hope that McFedries continues to do revised versions of this book as the need arises, because this is a valuable resource.

I tried a bunch of the basic books on website and blog creation which covered the same subjec matter and content, and this one was definitely the best. McFedries presents his info in clear, precise terms. He seems to know what is important to learn and what isn't for the beginner/intermediate web designer. He is also funny (which all the idiot and dummy books are designed to be) but he is appropriately funny without being condescending or using really lame humor as some other books in these series tend to do. Also recommended at this level are Learn HTML in a Weekend and Blogger (which only covers the google Blogger program).

This is a great book for beginners looking for information on how to start a website or blog for the first time. Paul McFedries walks you through step by step into HTML basics, a necessity for web page and blog structures. If a reader is wanting to learn HTML, basic web site knowledge, and javascripts this is the book to read. Paul McFedries is funny, knowledgable and, easy to follow.