The title provides a great introduction for complete newcomers to either social networking environment, but the course is sensibly structured so the starter videos on basic account set-up can be skipped by people who already have personal accounts. Setting up business accounts on Twitter and business pages on Facebook is then covered in full, with discussions and demonstrations of all the available functionality. Useful caveats are also provided when necessary. For example, you’re shown how to automatically import your blog into your Facebook page, but also warned why you probably don’t want to do this and given a sensible alternative.

The really valuable part of the title for many people will be its advice on using Twitter and Facebook strategically for business marketing, with special emphasis on increasing viral effects via ‘word of keyboard’.

For me some of the most interesting advice here included:

• Ways to cross-promote blog posts, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages.
• Advice on measuring the impact of Twitter and Facebook use – vital in a lot of business environments where the tools can be regarded as time-wasters.
• Tips on using Twitter, Facebook and companion tools like Tweetdeck to search for business opportunites and ideas.
• A useful breakdown of all the differences between pages and groups in Facebook – something I’ve never very clearly understood.
• Discussions of the terms of use for Twitter and Facebook. I hadn’t realised that Twitter forbids links in tweets to websites which are against its terms of service.

This is a fun title which is definitely worth a viewing if you’re a lynda.com subscriber with any interest in social marketing.

Social Media Marketing with Facebook and Twitter by Anne-Marie Concepción is available on the lynda.com training site.

Related posts

Review of WordPress.com Essential Training – another lynda.com title.

Among the more useful areas covered for web project management are:

• An emphasis in several contributions on agile project development, involving frequent interaction with clients to evaluate features as they’re created.
• Reflections on the inevitability of scope change after requirements have been finalized and ways to deal with this. A good tip is provided on planning possible scope reductions from the beginning of a project in a controlled way by grading requirements according to their business value and the degree that they have dependencies for other requirements. The nice-to-haves with no dependencies are the obvious candidates for culling if necessary later on.
• Encouraging simple solutions over complex ones – including in code development.
• Finding alternatives to long pointless meetings – frequent instant ’standup’ meetings are recommended by several contributors.

97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts is edited by Barbee Davis and published by O’Reilly.

Related posts

Free ebooks for web project management

This is the striking viewpoint of Kristina Halvorson’s book on content strategy which lays bare the complexities of content production. She offers plenty of common-sense advice about how to build website text into a key business asset, keep control of it over the long term and set measurable objectives for success.

Key to this is developing an appreciation of the political nature of content, engaging with content providers and giving reviewers plenty of notice for their contributions. ‘Don’t leave content management to your CMS’ is the clear message. You need people for meaningful, actionable content and the key person required is someone in overall charge of content – an editor-in-chief empowered to say no to the business when necessary.

The content audit is thoroughly explored as a content management tool. There are useful practical tips here, such as using indented outline numbers in your audit documentation - 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 , etc – so you can easily link specific pieces of content to matching references in the site map and other documents later. There’s also an interesting discussion of the use of page tables for content planning and advice on how to include qualitative judgments in your audit as well as just conducting a quantitative analysis of content

There’s a whole chapter on content maintenance – a subject you rarely see people write much about. This advises developing a maintenance plan, having enforceable well-documented rules and using regularly-scheduled qualitative audits to question the ongoing purpose of each piece of content. The latter point draws on Gerry McGovern’s useful advice that all content ought to be regularly reviewed and removed if it’s not meeting a business objective or helping users achieve a task.

The book has a lively pugnacious style which makes it an easy read about a subject that could easily have come across as dull. The author makes a stack of suggestions which anybody working on websites could benefit from. However, reading it only confirmed my pre-existing assumption that content strategy can be a hard sell.

Improving the status of content creation in most organisations involves fighting against the general assumption of management that ‘anyone can write content’. Within the professional web world it’s up against the status of more exciting and saleable web disciplines in design and development and specialisms like SEO which contribute more transparently to improving the bottom line. In this context, long-term content maintenance is never going to be generally considered as important as implementing an exciting new content management system or launching a flashy new site design. Recognising the centrality of textual content to a successful web presence is therefore always going to be difficult to sell to a lot of organisations, but this book is one of the best pitches I’ve seen so far.

Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson is published by New Riders.

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Letting Go of the Words is another recommended book on writing for the web which I reviewed last year.

I thought this book provided a good solid introduction to the issues surrounding monetizing blogs. It has plenty of tips which will be useful to any blogger – whether they’re interested in making money or not.  Despite the “six-figure income” bit of the title, the authors don’t push any get-rich-quick scams, but instead emphasise the time, hard work and discipline it takes to succeed. The personal blogging stories they provide in the introduction are particularly effective at getting this across – for example, this is Darren Rowse on his posting frequency:

“… there have been countless nights when I’ve worked into the wee hours of the morning blogging. Though I have better boundaries these days, it wasn’t unusual for me to post 50 times per day over 12 hours in front of the screen. “

This kind of makes me feel inadequate about my inability to manage one post a week…

The book starts with a chapter on “blogging for money” which looks broadly at different monetization methods for blogging and ways of measuring your blog’s success. This builds nicely into the second chapter on niche blogging, one of the core techniques for getting money out of blogs. The authors look at the benefits of finding the right niche and give detailed guidance on how to pick a profitable niche, considering:

• Are you interested in the topic? Do you have experience or expertise in it?
• Is the topic popular? Is the niche growing or shrinking?
• What’s the competition, and what’s it neglecting?
• Will you have enough content?
• Is the niche able to be monetized?
• How wide should a niche be?

Chapter 3 is about setting up a blog. Most of this is pitched at a basic level for people who haven’t tried blogging before – including a step-by-step guide to setting up a hosted blog at WordPress.com and a discussion of the benefits of hosted vs. self-hosted blogs. However, there are still some tips here which more experienced bloggers could gain from – especially in the discussion of factors to consider when choosing a domain name.

Chapter 4 is about blog writing. It’s probably the section of the book which will be most useful for all bloggers – not just those who are seeking to blog for profit. Topics covered include providing useful content, researching readership and writing tips for blogs. My favourite bit in this section is the list of 20 types of blog post – which should come in very handy if you ever get completely stuck for something to write.

The next couple of chapters are about actually making money, covering “blog income and earning strategies” and “buying and selling blogs”.  These provide wide-ranging coverage of issues surrounding advertising and other methods of earning income from blogging – including a short look at  indirect income earning strategies like freelance blogging, magazines and books, speaking, consulting and employment opportunities. The buying and selling section includes a discussion of flipping (buying blogs to sell them). There’s also coverage of how to value blogs and where and how to buy and sell them.

After a short section about blog networks, there’s a chapter on “blog promotion and marketing” which is definitely worth reading. It discusses building flagship content, commenting and linking generously, getting attention through link baiting, running competitions, using social media, SEO and tips for increasing page views on your blog.

The book is rounded off by a couple of short chapters covering “secrets of successful blogs” and “creating something worthwhile”.

Overall it’s a useful read – and it managed to motivate me at least enough to get me to write this post.

ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett was published last year by Wiley.

Related posts

For people looking to start using WordPress for their blogging efforts, see my review of  WordPress.Com Essential Training.

Its non-techie language makes it a good choice to give to clients or marketing colleagues who you want to steer away from SEO scammers. The author provides solid advice focusing on the need to provide ‘strong relevant content for users combined with links, keywords and phrases that make it search-engine friendly’. Readers are given a good appreciation of what to expect from an SEO professional and will also learn plenty of things they can do themselves to improve their site’s performance in the SERPs.

Amongst the sensible points made, there’s advice to ‘never hire anyone who promises the number one slot on Google’ and suitably dire warnings of the perils of link farms and black hat SEO. Detailed guidance is given on building a link strategy and minimising the effects on search engine ranking of moving domains. There’s nice balanced analyses of the importance of PageRank, the pros and cons of outsourced vs. internal SEO in organisations and the benefits of user-generated content for search. There’s also a welcome emphasis on the benefits of standards compliance for SEO, which it’s great to see presented to a non-technical audience.

Alongside all the good recommendations in the book, there were just a couple of things I didn’t totally agree with. There’s one section which reads like it encourages viewing “alt” text primarily as a keyword-placement opportunity rather than as a useful description for people using screen-readers. (Elsewhere however there is good accessibility advice on posting HTML transcripts for audio files.)

Also, I thought the section looking at Flash from an SEO viewpoint was overly negative for a book published in 2009. In 2008 Adobe and Google cooperated to deliver a great improvement in SWF search indexing and Flash sites now don’t have to be the search engine pariahs they once were (as long as developers know what they’re doing). Todd Perkins’ recent O’Reilly book on Search Engine Optimization for Flash covers the current state of play in great detail. It would be a shame if site owners just read ‘The Truth about Search Engine Optimization’ and dismissed all Flash development out of hand.

Generally though, this is a useful book you can recommend to anyone as an introduction to SEO or use as a refresher to provide a checklist of points any SEO project should cover.

The Truth about Search Engine Optimization by Rebecca Lieb is published by Que.

Related posts

Other books on SEO I’ve reviewed are Building Findable Websites and Where Search Meets Web Usability.

Drupal Multimedia offers an in-depth look at how to integrate images, videos and audio into a Drupal site. The intended audience is beginners and intermediate developers who want to learn how to better control and display media on their sites. Dealing with multimedia with Drupal often feels much more complicated than it should be, but this book definitely helps to make it more comprehensible.

Getting the learning curve right in the first chapter of an intermediate Drupal book can be tricky. I think ‘Drupal Multimedia’ does well here – assuming a bit of knowledge of Drupal, reviewing the basic building blocks of the system briefly, then diving right into installing the CCK and Views modules. Examples of using these are worked through, before moving on to discuss theming and overrides – again with simple examples. A lot is covered in the first forty pages, but without overwhelming the reader.

The second chapter begins to look at dealing with images, with good introductions to using the Image module and its related Image Gallery to easily create a simple gallery. There’s also a discussion of embedding images in articles with Drupal, which looks at how this can be done by enabling editors to use full HTML or, more usefully in many cases, how to use Image Assist to allow images to be added to posts more easily. Installing TinyMCE as a WYSIWYG editor which works with Image Assist is also covered. This chapter will be very useful to new users of Drupal, for whom the lack of a built-in editor and basic image-adding functionality is likely to be something they miss straight away. The next two chapters go into more detail about using images – looking at more complicated development and theming issues. There’s examples here of using the ImageField and ImageCache modules and coverage of how to customise your image output.

Video is covered in two chapters which look at dealing with both third-party and local video. Using the Embedded Media Field module for third-party video is covered, followed by a look at using the FileField and jQuery Media modules for serving local video. A chapter on file asset management covers options for managing media files, looking primarily at the Node Reference, Asset and Media Mover modules. Audio is covered in three chapters looking at audio nodes, audio fields and theming audio. These discuss the Audio module and also revisit the FileField, jQuery Media and Embedded Media Field modules.

The final chapter is an interesting preview of the future of Drupal multimedia. This offers a tantalizing glimpse into an easier future for handling multimedia with Drupal 7. For me, two of the biggest drawbacks of using Drupal for building and maintaining sites are the hoops you have to jump through to deal with simple file handling and the hideous complexity of the administration menus. A lot of the administration options are frankly unintuitive and difficult to remember if you’re not using them constantly. It’s good to learn from this chapter that the Drupal development community is actively working to improve things in these areas.

I got a lot out of this book overall – especially from the detailed recommendations for the use of particular modules. The author puts across complicated concepts very accessibly with well-chosen examples which build up satisfyingly to help you understand the big picture.

Drupal Multimedia by Aaron Winborn is published by Packt Publishing.

Related posts

I’ve looked at other books on Drupal in previous posts on Learning Drupal and Drupal 6 Themes.

The author focuses purely on the pre-coding design stage of building a site.  However, he takes the sensible view that someone designing a website  needs to understand implementation issues so that the design won’t be unnecessarily difficult to code once the Photoshop comps are complete.

The book covers the whole of this design process, starting with getting an effective brief out of  clients. There’s good advice here about asking clients which sites they like or dislike and why – which it’s rightly said can be as informative as a design brief in itself.  There follows a good discussion on wireframing and an excellent section on aesthetics. The latter has a very succinct summary of best practice regarding layout and composition, with good links to  tools for choosing colour schemes and using grids.

Some of the most interesting parts of the book are the tips on how to effectively present your designs to clients via Photoshop comps and mock-up sites. This should be of particular help to a lot of people starting out, as compiling deliverables is an area which doesn’t tend to get a lot of coverage in other books.

As well as the designs for the example  site, there are well-chosen screen-shots from real sites which enrich the book a lot. Throughout, the author emphasises the importance of attention to detail and the designer’s responsibility to push at boundaries, while respecting useful conventions.

Sexy Web Design by Elliot Jay Stocks is published by Sitepoint.

The book uses the concept of the ’scent of information’ to put forward a unified theory of web-searching behaviour, which also draws heavily on a categorisation of query types into navigational, informational and transactional – categories which search engines use to anticipate the intent of a user’s search. These different query types are fully explored and there is also detailed coverage of how to estimate the benefits of search usability and how different types of web professional can work together to improve it. The final chapter contains a set of easy-to-employ usability tests for search usability which should be of real practical benefit when developing sites.

The authors are at their most interesting when looking at the limitations of the SEO and usability mindsets and advising how the two can learn from each other. Usability professionals are told to look more at how people get to web sites rather than just what they do when they get there. Stereotypical SEOers, on the other hand,  should spend more time considering whether users are satisfied when they get to a site rather than just concentrating on getting as many eyes on the page as possible. Usability types could take advantage of SEO keyword tools as a way of getting to understand the language employed by users, while SEO practitioners can benefit from speaking to actual users and employing usability testing to understand why their interaction with search engines and sites works out like it does.

Out of this clash of viewpoints, there’s some nice common-sense points made which you may not have seen argued before. For example, it’s explained why a high bounce rate could be a good thing in some circumstances – if people are getting what they want on the first page they visit. Equally, we see why a number one SERP rating can be a bad thing if it results in brand devaluation due to visitors not getting what they want out of the site when they find it.

So overall, its an interesting read and a refreshingly holistic view on a topic which feels like it’s been done to death recently.

When Search Meets Web Usability by Shari Thurow and Nick Musica is published by New Riders.

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Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walter is another very good book on SEO which also takes a wide view of the subject.

There’s an ever-growing number of decent books appearing about Drupal, covering in detail various aspects of this complex CMS and catering to different experience levels and levels of coding ability. ‘Drupal 6 Themes’ by Ric Shreves fills a niche for detailed coverage of Drupal’s theming functionality for users with decent HTML and CSS skills, and maybe a little bit of PHP. It’s a book that I think designers and web managers wanting to add Drupal to their skill-set can get a lot out of reading and it’ll certainly help a lot if you’re starting out on the labour of wrangling with the design of a site based on a theme someone else created.

The book’s well written with a sensible structure, moving from general discussions of how theming in Drupal works to specific demonstrations of how to modify existing themes and build new ones from scratch. There’s a very clear explanation of the best ways to employ intercepts and overrides to achieve style changes and useful coverage of theming Drupal’s forms.

One of the most difficult things about changing the look of Drupal sites is the sheer number of CSS and template files you usually have to wade through. This book includes a short introduction to tools which can help with this – like Devel’s Theme Developer module, and the Firebug and Web Developer extensions for Firefox. There’s also detailed listings of Drupal’s theming elements and core CSS files.

Overall, this is a good solid read which can really enhance a new or intermediate Drupal user’s appreciation of how to get the most of theming. However, theming isn’t the only thing you need to master to get a Drupal site looking exactly the way you want. For an all-round understanding of  Drupal’s front-end, I’d also recommend you look at O’Reilly’s recent Using Drupal as well, which has demonstrations of using CCK and Views – as well as a good chapter on theming (although it doesn’t go into as much detail as this book). There’s also a forthcoming book on Front End Drupal due out next month which I definitely want to pick up.

Drupal 6 Themes: Create New Themes for Your Drupal 6 Site with Clean Layout and Powerful CSS Styling by Ric Shreves is published by Packt Publishing.

Related posts

I looked at a number of other starter resources for getting to grips with Drupal this January in a post on Learning Drupal.

The first part of the book discusses what can we learn about the human condition from internet usage data via a series of snapshots of online behaviour. These look at subjects as diverse as porn, politics, prom dresses, diets, celebrity worship and people’s worst fears. There are lots of interesting snippets to be found in all this – from the problems caused to political pollsters by the increasing tendency to drop landline phones in favour of mobiles to data indicating that Sunday is the least popular day for people to browse porn sites. The chapter on fears focuses on search queries and has a nice potted description of the authoritative status search engines have assumed in a lot of people’s lives - “Search engines, despite their limitations, have for some of us become a teacher, a confidant, a willing listener to our confessions.”

There follows a good chapter on the concepts of Web 2.0, focusing particularly on their potential downsides. The closing part of the book explores what can be done with web data analysis, the continuing power of television programming on what people search for online and  arbitrage opportunities from internet data. The final chapters look particularly at the role of early adopters and “super-connectors” in boosting online trends and how their behaviour can be used to predict the future mainstream.

I don’t think Click delivers any huge revelations but, as you’d expect from a Time magazine columnist, it’s all pleasantly readable. From chapter to chapter the book sometimes feels a bit disconnected – more like a meandering series of articles than a single tightly argued narrative. However the chatty informal style is also part of the book’s charm and helps to make it an enjoyable, if undemanding, read.

The author is particularly successful at conveying his sheer enthusiasm for the work of data analysis. He infuses his discussions of the process of formulating and testing theories with a sense of fun.  The book is at its most interesting where he happily discusses cases where his predictions have been wrong-footed by events, and then goes through the process he went through to find out what went wrong and how similar analyses could be refined in the future.

The book was published in the US last year, but I’ve been reading the recently released UK edition.  A nice feature of this is that the author has gone to the effort of  updating and anglicising the book at bit.

Click: What We Do Online and Why it Matters by Bill Tancer is published by Harper Collins