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Beyond the Hype:
what every web marketer should know

Reviewed by William R. Eubank

Beyond the Hype:
what every web marketer should know

by Charles Cook

Copyright 1997 In Mind Communications, LLC.
Published by In Mind Communications, LLC.

119 pages
sellmore.pdf file format -
viewed by Adobe Acrobat Reader 3.0

Electronic Mail July 10, 1997
From: webmaster@infozine.com
To: William Eubank

Hello Adrienne and William,

Thought you both would like to see this . . . and now as I think about it . . . <G>

Would you both mind doing a review or, what you think about this piece for the August Issue, Adrienne from the Marketing side and William from the web masters point of view?

Let me know

Thanks
Richard

*********************

Richard Greene is very good about steering me into "things" that are useful to me - timely - just the stuff I am about to get into anyway - so I took him up on the offer.

Over the last two years, I have had plenty of opportunity to review web related books, software and web sites but I must admit that this experience was unique.

Instead of waiting for a week or more for a paperback/hardback copy to come from the publisher, Richard had a download ID, a password and a download address for me within a day and the Adobe Acrobat.pdf file was sitting on my computer ready to be read in short order.

I quickly found out that my older version of Acrobat (which had been on my Windows 3.11 machine) would not work on my Windows 95 platform so I had to make another (almost painless) trip to the web and download a 32-bit version - well, I was going to do that anyway, someday.

Throughout the last few days, I have had some difficulty in convincing myself that I was in fact reviewing a "book" (Richard even called it a "piece") although the publisher and author certainly call it a book . . . Somehow, it just doesn't seem to be a BOOK - and this is coming from the self-proclaimed librarian of the Gibson Digital Library - that contains almost 500 E-texts from the Gutenberg Project.

I also had just a little trouble with the title, "Beyond the Hype" because some parts of the book seemed to be, well a bit "hypee." However, after getting into the book just a few pages - and certainly by page 20, I was fully involved.

If you get a book you can't put down (not that I ever exactly picked it up), if you read a book you want to tell others about, if the book entertains or gives you practical, down to earth (cyberspace) advice, well then you have a worthwhile book. Mr. Cook's book certainly did those things for me. Today I met with three of my web site clients, Red Cross of Greater Kansas City (http://www.kcmo.com/RedCross/), Consensus - National Futures and Financial Weekly (http://www.consensus-inc.com/) and the Santa Fe Railway Historical and Modeling Society (http://www.kcmo.com/ATSF/) and I couldn't stop talking about parts of this book.

As a Web-Master, I find that I spend a great deal of time in educating my clients about the web and the potential/pitfalls for their companies. The line between marketing and web-mastering overlaps, and each of my clients are fully into the development of their sites - they need practical, no frill answers to questions about developing their sites.

Mr. Cook speaks from experience - a great teacher - which he seems to have survived - and learned from. He admits that he took some wrong turns back in his 'early days' (about two years ago) that cost him some money and frustration. My feeling is that if each of my present - future customers reads this book - 'our' development of their site will go very smoothly.

From my own perspective, I learned some very specific things from reading this book - and this is after 40+ sites and 3,500 'pages' of work - I believe I had about 87.34175% of Cook's ideas down but needed some direction on "Payment resources" and some evaluation tools.

I want my clients to see some of his estimates about how much time is involved in adding sites to search engines and exchanging links with reciprocal sites. He also gives some good information about what "hits" and unique sites served means BUT could probably stand adding just a few more examples.

"This book is published online in order to keep it current." implies that their might be later editions - updates. That is exactly as it should be. I would like to see Mr. Cook include a section about NGOs - Non Governmental Organizations and how these 'not for profit' corporations can use the web to meet their service goals and more effectively use their monetary resources in their outreach programs. I have found it very easy to document to these groups, ways of getting more out of their publication budgets. After all, more efficient use of resources can be just as valuable to the bottom line as increased income.

A final note: The fine print on the front page says in part: "No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system . . . " So exactly how do we download it (without reproducing it), or read it (if our computer is not a retrieval system)? Perhaps their acceptance of your $21.95 is equal to written permission - for limited reproduction and retrieval on your personal computer. Now what happens if I want to turn it into a real BOOK (the tree killing kind) by printing it?

It is worth the $21.95.

William R. Eubank has taught in Alaska, China, Hong Kong, Texas, Mexico and Argentina and has served on local and state school boards. He has contributed to "Caregiving" (a national newsletter for persons caring for an aging relative found at: http://pages.prodigy.com/caregiving/ ), "the Warbonnet" (a publication of the Santa Fe Railway Historical & Modeling Society found at http://www.kcmo.com/atsf/), and is Web-Master at One Crossroads Place BBS and serves as Web Librarian for the Gibson Digital Library found at http://kcmo.com/gdl/

William R. Eubank has taught in Alaska, China, Hong Kong, Texas, Mexico and Argentina and has served on local and state school boards. He has contributed to "Caregiving" (a national newsletter for persons caring for an aging relative found at: http://pages.prodigy.com/caregiving ), "the Warbonnet" (a publication of the Santa Fe Railway Historical & Modeling Society found at http://www.kcmo.com/atsf), and is Webmaster at One Crossroads Place BBS and serves as Web Librarian for the Gibson Digital Library found at http://www.kcmo.com/gdl

William R. Eubank
1632 Burcham Drive
East Lansing, Michigan 48823
United States of America

wmeubank@yahoo.com