Faith and Web

Books for Creating Excellent Church Websites

The following is a highly selective list of my favorite books in various categories. These are the books I refer to over and over again or recommend to others wanting to learn more about a topic related to church web development and design.

General Introductions

• Don’t Make Me Think
  Steve Krug
  Almost all web professionals recommend this book, and there’s a reason. It cuts to the chase and is an easy read no matter whether you are a techie or not. If you want to read just one book to help you improve your website, this would be it.
• Web ReDesign: Workflow that Works
  Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler
  For those starting a site from scratch or doing a major overhaul, this is my top recommendation. It helps you see the big picture and gets you organized.
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
  Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville
  While its focus is large-scale websites, this is an easy read, with eye-opening insights on how to set up navigation and structure your site.
• Rule the Web: How to Do Anything and Everything on the Internet—Better, Faster, Easier
  by Mark Frauenfelder
  All church webmasters seem to be bombarded by computer questions. Want the answers? Look here. see my review.

Design and Cascading Style Sheets

• The Non-Designer’s Design Book
  Robin Williams
  A short and easy-to-read introduction to the principles of design.
• Eric Meyer on CSS
  Eric Meyer
  I’d learned a bit of CSS here and there before getting this book, but it turbo-charged my understanding of this critical component of designing a great website.
• Bulletproof Web Design
  Dan Cederholm
  Once turbo-charged by the above book, I refined and expanded my understanding with this book, which addresses grittier CSS issues, like 3 column layout.

Blogging

• Clear Blogging: How People Blogging Are Changing the World and How You Can Join Them
  Bob Walsh
  See my review
• The Blogging Church: Sharing the Story of Your Church Through Blogs
  Brian Bailey
  See my review

Dreamweaver

• Dreamweaver MX Hands-On Training
  Garo Green and Abigail Rudner
  Also known as Dreamweaver HOT, whenever anyone asks me for a book about learning Dreamweaver, this is the one. That’s because I learned Dreamweaver from an earlier edition of the same.
• Web Design in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference
  Jennifer Niederst Robbins
  This is a series of excellent introductions to the most important topics for a webmaster (standards, server fundamentals, character sets, and so forth). It’s particularly good for someone who knows a bit of HTML and wants to know more.

PHP and MySQL

• PHP for the World Wide Web (Visual QuickStart Guide)
  Larry Ullman
  This is the book that taught me PHP. It’s small, which makes it less intimidating than your average PHP book, and still does an excellent job of covering all of the basics.
• PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites (Visual QuickPro Guide)
  Larry Ullman
  It’s possible you could start with this book. It wasn’t available when I first learned PHP, but I liked the more basic one so much, I got this one later as a refresher, and it lived up to my expectations.
• PHP and MySQL Web Development
  Luke Welling and Laura Thomson
  Another excellent introduction to both PHP and MySQL.

Other

• UNIX for Dummies
  Margaret Levine Young and John R. Levine
  For those times when you have to deal with Unix (e.g. to change file permissions), there’s no better reference for both the super-geek and the tech-timorous.