Our Web Development Book Series

I'm excited to announce the first installments of our series, A Newfangled Approach to Your Website. You may have already seen the banners for volumes 1 and 2 on our homepage, but I thought a blog post was in order to tell the story of how it came about...

A Newfangled Approach to Your Website, Volume 2 (picture taken by Dave Mello)

Soon after I inherited the job of writing our monthly newsletter from our founder, Eric Holter, Mark and I began thinking of ways to re-engage reader interest in some of our older material. Because we published so regularly, it was easy to lose sight of the vast amount of information that preceeded the most recent article. We ended up incorporating some categorization, filtering, and related-content functionality into the redesign we launched last January to deal with this, but we had a sense that there were other opportunities—offsite ones—to re-purpose newsletter content that would be attractive to readers.

I'd been experimenting with using Lulu.com to create book anthologies of web articles (v1.0, v2.0, v3.0) for myself and was so impressed with the simplicity of the process and high quality results that applying the same idea to our content seemed like it could actually be worthwhile. So, Justin and I began working together—I compiling and editing the content for print, he creating an elegant interior template and covers for the book.

Our first stab (pictured left), which took much longer than we anticipated, became Volume 1. By then, an entire year's worth of new article content had accrued, so we were ready to go ahead and release Volume 2 as well. I'm thrilled with them. I'm intrigued with this new kind of book—the web book, or book of web content—and think Justin did a fantastic job making them both attractive and readable. We've already gotten positive feedback about Volume 1, and are anticipating more feeback for Volume 2 after distributing a couple dozen copies while attending HOW's Mind Your Own Business Conference last week. If you have purchased one, I'd love to hear what you think, too.

You can purchase them both now through Lulu.com (follow the links in this article), either in printed format or downloadable PDF. For those of you with Kindles, Nooks, iPads, and the like, we're working on ePub-formatted versions, too. We'll keep you posted on that.

A shot of the interior of A Newfangled Approach to Your Website, Volume 2