The Big Red Fez: Zooming, Evolution, and the Future of Your Company [Paperback]

While this book is in no means comprehensive, it is a small invenstment into the future of your web site and business. At $10 and only a half hour read you only need 1 good example to make the book worthwhile!

There are already lots of books out there about HTML and basic web design, and this book won't teach you how to write code or adjust the RGB settings of your graphic files. The Big Red Fez is the book to read after you have learned the technical nuts-and-bolts (or hired them out to someone else) and you are ready to focus on making your site more profitable.

The book's methodology is to examine various real ecommerce sites, and point out their flaws and strong points. While this may sound simple, Godin's insights are extremely perceptive. Everyone who has ever planned or built a commercial website will recognize at least one of their own mistakes in the Big Red Fez.

Most of all, I like the practical tone of this book. It was written in the aftermath of the Internet bubble. Most of us inevitably absorbed some of the overblown pretenses of the Internet boom years (ex: a focus on flashy multimedia content). The Big Red Fez is therefore a good debriefing for the entrepreneurs and marketing execs who are ready to move forward into the "New" New Economy.

In this 100-page book, Godin advocates the simple marketing principal of putting only, as he says it, "one banana" per page - that is only asking the user to do one thing at a time by focusing on the question, 'what do you want the user to actually do?' He demonstrates the effectiveness of this principal by having a single main point for each two-page site-review.

The book also provides a simple metric for designing sites - the further along (or closer to giving you their money / permission / etc.) the more valuable he or she is. As such, the site should direct users along the path to purchase (etc.) not sidetrack them with other suggestions or paths.

The book is not a collection of general principals, but rather a critique of over fifty actual web pages, some praised, others picked apart. As such, the application of the principals is crystal-clear.

The book is clear and concise and (like many of Godin's other books) is a must-read for anyone designing, marketing-through, or engineering a website.