Books which say they can teach you something in a weekend are making bold claims. After all, it's fairly obvious that it takes most people that long just to
read a computer manual, let alone master the skills on offer. But if the author's intention is to provide basic information, well organised and clearly explicated, then the impetus is probably a good one.
William Stanek certainly offers plenty of good advice on Web site management and promotion, and he expresses it well, with no unnecessary frills or obfuscation. His book is organised in four main sections: understanding web server logs; analysing log results and building the results into page design; understanding search engines and directories; and site promotion techniques. There are plenty of screen shots, full details of URLs are given, and there's a good glossary.
All this makes good sense, but I do wish he could have found some way of delaying the mind-boggling issues of log statistics and analysis. My brain was reeling by page fifty. Fortunately, it's much easier reading when he passes on to the practical advice of the details of what to include in <META> tags, how to prepare pages for the search engines, and how to push the limits of the rules on submission.
This whole subject is fraught with complexities. The webmeisters want to beat the search engines. There are endless gimmicks of repeated words in page headers, invisible white text on a white background, and devious ruses of dummy URLs and calling every page on a site 'index.htm'. But the search engines and their spiders fight back with more complex algorithms to tweak out these deviants and punish them by exclusion.
Stanek plays fair in this respect by telling his readers what the current conventions are, as well as hinting at one or two strategies for pushing the rules without actually breaking them. And like most books on Web commerce, he urges patience. There can be a significant gap between page submission and featuring at the top of search results.
Once I had battled through the log statistics, the remainder of the advice on navigational strategy and page design struck me as very revealing and quite encouraging. In fact I've now got several pages of notes - which unfortunately points towards a major site overhaul.
