Do the Web Write by Dan Furman (Review)

Released March 2009 (Self-Counsel Press) * 180 pages * ISBN-13: 9781551808321

Do the Web Write: Writing for and Marketing Your Website by Dan Furman takes you through writing your business site. Although he does spend some time on structure and navigation, Furman focuses on content writing in this book by addressing the question: Just what the heck am I supposed to put on my website anyway?

Like his other book, Start & Run a Real Home-Based Business (which I reviewed), this book is written in a conversational tone that is easy to read.

The book covers which pages you should have on your site, what you should put on each of these pages, and how to write the content. There are also sections on SEO, text formatting, conversion rates, press releases and testing your website copy. For the most part the advice is useful and easy to implement (in fact, I think Furman addresses just about every pet peeve I have about small business websites included hopelessly outdated blogs or outdated What’s New sections–hint: don’t do that).

At one point Furman goes on at some length about not needing to know the rules of punctuation in order to write. His point is that writing the way you were taught to in grade school with full sentences and thesis statements at the beginning of paragraphs and the like is inappropriate for the web.

While I completely agree with that point (many of the “rules” you learn in school are actually not rules), I disagree that you don’t need to know proper punctuation. In order to break rules effectively, you first have to know them. I think Furman does a disservice to readers by suggesting otherwise. This is a relatively minor part of the book, but it’s the only advice that I just couldn’t get behind.

This book, like his other book, comes with a CD of forms and samples that are very useful but not printed in the book. The CD is not Mac compatible, which I mentioned in my last review, but the publisher says they are working on the issue (see comments on previous review) so I won’t go over it again.

The CD samples include a checklist for maintaining your website (like making sure all the links, forms, etc. work–obvious, but then why do so many sites fail at this?), several examples of press releases Furman has done for his own business, a press release template, and a questionnaire to help you get feedback on your site.

If you need to write content for your website, or you’re hiring someone to do it, then this is a handy reference that should help you write or at least recognize content that will work on your website. You can buy this and other Self-Counsel Press books from Self-Counsel Press (US and Canada) and Amazon (US, Canada, UK).

You can also win a copy of this book or another Self-Counsel book right here. As soon as I put up the contest post. Soon. Today, even–assuming my laptop doesn’t implode. I mean it this time. I think I promised to post the contest soon after the last Self-Counsel Press review, but life happened and it didn’t get done.

Related Posts

1. Writing for the Web by Crawford Kilian (Review)
2. Start & Run a Real Home-Based Business by Dan Furman (Review)
3. Start & Run Your Own Internet Research Business by Gerhard Kautz (Review)
4. Marketing in the New Media by Holly Berkley (Review)
5. No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog by Margaret Mason (Review)