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Website Optimization Review

by Tim Frick

If you’re at all involved in website creation or content, you should definitely check this book out. Website Optimization by Andrew B. King is a comprehensive resource that can help web designers and developers build better and speedier sites that engage users and drive traffic. That’s the simple truth.

How it accomplishes this lofty feat is through a detailed and multidisciplinary approach to CSS, JavaScript, design, content writing, marketing, advertising, SEO, conversion ratio optimization, and about a gajillion other topics. This multidisciplinary approach means that just about anyone, from newcomers to seasoned professionals, can find useful content in its pages, making it a valuable resource for those looking to boost site traffic or better serve customers online. It will also help entire teams comprised of many specialists in the aforementioned areas get a better understanding of tasks and techniques that may fall outside of their area of expertise.

Though the book does provide something for everyone on the topic of site optimization, those with an aversion to code may find themselves quickly overwhelmed in some chapters. This is an O’Reilly book, after all. Code samples for optimizing HTML, CSS, and Ajax for both performance speed and SEO are amply provided throughout, as are techniques for addressing network robustness, minimizing HTTP requests, and server-side optimization techniques such as HTTP compression, the pros and cons of delta encoding for RSS feeds, and rewriting URIs with mod_rewrite, to name a few. Depending on your existing knowledge and skill set its content may quickly go over your head with technical details. Thus, portions of the book’s usefulness may rely on whether you are a designer, developer, marketer or writer. That said, the book is also chock full of tips and tricks on how to optimize graphics, build better pay-per-click (PPC) search engine marketing campaigns, and write keyword-rich, benefits-driven copy that incites user action, so it isn’t just about the code. Hence my claim that it offers something for everyone. Designers, writers and marketers can gloss over specifics of the code examples and still find the book a valuable resource. At the very least they will get a better understanding of the development process, which could in turn foster a more harmonious workflow for entire teams.

The book has a bevy of other features as well. It includes detailed information on the dizzying array of available web metrics solutions that enable you to track site success and build or revise your content approach accordingly. A comprehensive list of external tools and resources is incorporated into the body copy of each chapter. And what would a book on website optimization be complete without a companion website? The book’s site is a handy (but admittedly pretty nasty-looking) resource with links to useful resources like site performance score cards, site speed tests, and so on.

There are, in my opinion, a few drawbacks as well. The book assumes a certain level of knowledge and skill, which, with such a multidisciplinary approach, can be a bit of a problem, as it often neglects to provide context for some of the terms it uses. For instance, H.264 is brought up in the book’s cursory mention of video, but no tangible references to what it is or why it’s better than other forms of video compression are made. And speaking of cursory mention, the book barely tips a hat to Flash content and, due to an unfortunately timed release date, was published the same month that Adobe announced the Flash SEO initiative, so it doesn’t touch on that topic at all. It’s easy to dismiss Flash when it comes to optimizing a site for search engines, but the fact remains that there is a huge amount of Flash content on the internet and developers have been creating workarounds for indexing that content for years now. It will be interesting to see if the topic of optimizing Flash content, especially in lieu of Adobe’s July 2008 Flash SEO announcement, will be covered in a 2nd edition.

Other than the few omissions mentioned above, I found this book to be an extremely informative resource for entire teams devoted to building websites. Though its many code samples make it somewhat developer-centric, the context it provides for additional areas of site design and content development make it useful across the board. 

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