Clout

Saturday June 4, 2011

Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content by Colleen Jones : New Riders (Pearson/Penguin), Berkeley, CA; 2011 paperback isbn 9780321733016

There is a need for a writing guide/design book on how to build websites — no, not the underlying code, or HTML and CSS and CMS and SEO and all that crap. Plenty of books already, and more importantly: there are tools out there to cover the basics, and many professionals (and talented amateurs) who need the work and are ready to do this sort of thing for you.

With a bit of time and the right people, one can build a professional-looking website in a matter of days. Hours, even, if time is a factor.

What we really need, though, is a book on content. Clout tries to fill that gap – and largely fails.

Here at BookNom.net, we don’t review books we don’t like, though, so let me tell what the book is, what it isn’t, and why it’s worth more than a little bit of your time anyway.

Clout covers the web from a business perspective: BIG business, the kind of folks with advertising budgets and multiple professionals on staff (or the money for freelancers) — so it’s not so much a matter of the book being wrong for me [lonely, aspiring website owner] as that it covers things on a different scale. A lot of the points in Clout are either obvious to small-fry like me—engage your readers, focus on content, persist through roadblocks—or so far past what I currently do as to be almost in another language.

Still, no one else has even tried. I give Jones full credit for writing the first book on the topic, and I’ll recommend it to you. And you (and your website) might be at a point where you’ll get a lot more from this book than I was able. For now, I’m putting this book and most of it’s ideas on a shelf, for ready reference later.

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