Information Architecture is an excellent book about how to organize the tremendous amounts of information that organizations have on the web. Whether you are creating a large dot com site, or a small intranet with multiple departments, this book will be extremely useful.

Naturally, every web site is different. And if you do not understand the business model and goals of the organization, the web site design will suffer. Designing a web site (or a series of web sites) is a difficult task, and you need to ask a lot of people some difficult questions about their web strategy.

This book does a good job of guiding people through this process, and the inevitable political pitfalls... From convincing the web group that the current design does not server their audience well, to what kinds of questions to ask the stakeholders and decision makers, to getting feedback from the end users.

It also gives a pretty good overview of search engines, taxonomies, thesauri, navigation, proper language and labels, metadata, content management, and other tools that help you keep a web site organized and current.

I have two main complaints. First, it didn't spend enough time on usability, so you will need another book along those lines (like Don't Make Me Think!).

Second, it didn't cover the dangers that a rigid thesaurus has on Google rank, and general Search Engine Optimization. So you'll need another book on that. Unfortunately, I've never read a on SEO that was any good, so I cannot recommend one.