Bryan Nesbitt, who designed Chrysler’s PT Cruiser appears in an advertisement in Rolling Stone. Shiro Nakamura, design lead for Nissan, graces TV commercials in Japan. The celebrity of these men and their colleagues emphasizes the increasing importance of design in our everyday lives.

Whether designing a functioning machine or a Website, design is often what stands between customer satisfaction and customer annoyance. My Rio MP3 CD player, for example, is easy to use, a pretty color blue, compact enough to fit in a fanny pack, and doesn’t skip when I work out. So why am I annoyed? It didn’t come with an AC adapter. I tried the AC adapter from my old CD player (same voltage, etc.) but it didn’t fit the adapter port. I tried two universal adapters with various size adapter port connectors. NONE of the adapter port connectors worked. Either the idiots at Rio accidentally designed the adapter port the wrong size, or they deliberately made it proprietary so that I would have to buy an adapter FROM THEM. I’m not sure which possibility annoys me more.

Which emphasizes that poor design can be deliberate or accidental; but good design is no accident.

Design is especially important these days for Websites, although you wouldn’t know it for all the poorly designed Websites that grace our screens. As with all new technologies, it takes a while for design to catch up with capability, so Website design is still very much an evolving science. I’ve been interested in Website design for at least five years now, so the fact that I volunteered to review Peter Kent’s Poor Richard’s Website is also no accident.

I've read all the For Dummies books in the MCSE series. I've also read Fitness Walking for Dummies, Cats for Dummies and A+ Certification for Dummies. All were clearly and concisely written, although in the MCSE series they dealt with arcane information. I could barely grasp TCP/IP and Internet Information Server simply because I didn't have the background to follow it all. But I still managed to grasp a lot of it, simply because the books were well designed and well-written. If you like the “For Dummies” series, you’ll also like Poor Richard’s Website.

Now that I am actually designing an e-commerce Website I understand the importance of the approach Mr. Kent takes. His book is not merely about Website design, although he does deal with the subject and even gives examples of good design and poor design. His book deals with the mechanics behind Website design. I learned just about everything I needed to know about Website mechanics from this book.

Don’t let the possibility of having to read about arcane Website mechanics scare you away. The book is actually written for the businessman who wants a Website, particularly an e-commerce site, and doesn’t have a clue where to start.

Peter Kent, author of the best-selling Complete Idiot's Guide to the Internet, The Official Netscape JavaScript 1.2 Book and 32 other books is a technical writer and Web builder who knows his technology but also understands that the computer book business has a technology bias that frustrates many readers. There are too many books that throw technology at the reader as if technology for technology's sake is what it is all about. There are too few books that answer real people's questions about computers.  Poor Richard's Website aims to correct that problem by answering everything you could possibly ask about putting up a Website and some questions you didn't know enough to ask.

Chapter 1, Do You Really Need a Website? tells you what Websites are good for, and even more important, what they are not good for.  He admonishes you to remember that the Internet is first and foremost a giant jobs program for computer geeks.

This chapter states the issue, lists the choices then guides you through each of the options by process of elimination, describing the worst choices first. For the curious, the first choice is "To get incredibly rich making new sales to millions of customers."

Surprisingly, Kent also describes why you shouldn't put up a Website, and what you can do as an alternative.

In a section called Fools and Angels Kent decries one of the most common Internet myths: You better get onto the Internet quickly or your competition will be there first. Instead, he suggests: Get online by all means, but do it right!

Chapter 2, What You Need Before You Start, lists the items you need to get started publishing a Web site. The basic list reads:

• A computer
• Hardware connecting the computer to the Internet
• Internet access through an Internet Service Provider
• A POP e-mail account
• Somewhere to put your Web site
• Basic Internet access software
• Basic Internet knowledge
• Advanced research and marketing software.

 On the other hand you don’t have to pass up a Web hosting service that doesn’t offer mailing list services, shopping cart software, online credit card and check processing and promotional and design services, because all of these can be found elsewhere, and the host can even tell you where to look.
 
 In Chapter 5, he goes into detail regarding Domain Names, how to pick the right one, and how to get it registered. You’ll even learn how IP addresses are translated into Domain Names so that you can impress your friends at your next cocktail party. More pertinent is help deciding whether you should have a .com, .net or even a .xxx domain, and what all this means in the first place.
 
 Another important issue is who to employ to design the site, and what you should do once you find him (get a turnkey bid and allow him to have a mailto on your site, but no link to his site!)
 
 What Poor Richard’s Website is not about is coding in HTML. Although he has a chapter on HTML basics, it is VERY basic.  If you want to learn HTML, a better choice is Elizabeth Castro’s HTML for the World Wide Web. However, if you know NOTHING about HTML and just want to learn a little, Poor Richard gives a painless introduction. Another chapter deals with selecting an authoring tool, such as Front Page or Dreamweaver, and lists the best choices for the novice or for the sophisticated Web designer.
 
 If you’re interested in finding out more about Poor Richard’s Website (and other publications) log into <http://PoorRichard.com/>.