Michael Purvis

Every business needs a website - plain and simple. In this day and age, if you're not showing up when people search out your business, products or services online, you're heading for trouble.A website is one of the most significant assets for any business. It's a 24 7 salesperson for your company or brand. Your website can (and will), either attract, or repel, would-be-customers, long before they ever talk to a real person in your business.What most business owners don't realize (because the majority of website design agencies don't want you to know), is that the website itself is only a very small part of your online presence. And it's the things you do before building your website, and the things you do after it's launched, that lead to real business growth.If you want your website to become your single biggest source of new customers - and you want to capture more market share from your competition (a lot more), then this book is for you. An effective website should drive business growth (and revenue), above all else. And in this book we'll show you how to make that happen.

The Google Maps API remains one of the showcase examples of the Web 2.0 development paradigm. Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax: From Novice to Professional is the first book to comprehensively introduce the service from a developer perspective, showing you how you can integrate mapping features into your Rails-driven web applications. Proceeding far beyond simplistic map display, youll learn how to draw from a variety of data sources such as the U.S. Census Bureau's TIGER/Line data and Google's own geocoding feature to build comprehensive geocoding services for mapping many locations around the world. The book also steers you through various examples that show how to encourage user interaction such as through pinpointing map locations, adding comments, and building community-driven maps. Youll want to pick up a copy of this book because This is the first book to comprehensively introduce the Google Maps application development using the Rails development framework. Youll be introduced to the very latest changes to the Google Maps API, embodied in the version 2 release. It is written by four developers actively involved in the creation of location-based mapping services. For additional info, please visit the author's reference site for this book.