e-Commerce

online business, site optimization, and affiliate selling

online business, site optimization, and affiliate selling

Speed Up Your Site

July 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

tips and techniques for improving download times

According to Andrew King, the best way to get people to your site and keep them there is to provide speed, feedback, clear navigation, and fun. His new book Speed up your Site is essentially a series of guidance notes and techniques for shaving every ounce of excess fat from your web pages. This means trimming everything which is not necessary, shortening every bit of code, and compressing the pages wherever possible. It’s intermediate level technically, but anybody with a web page or two could learn something from what he offers – and his instructions are clearly written and well illustrated.

He starts out with a chapter of evidence to support the notion that “without feedback, the length of time that users will wait for web pages to load is from 8 to 12 seconds” – though in days where people are increasingly on broadband, these figures seem a bit high to me. One of the novel concepts he introduces is the idea of ‘flow’ – a state of being when we are at one with the activity at hand. What this means in Web terms is that we will go back to those sites where we get rapid feedback.

It becomes really interesting when he embarks on HTML optimisation. Since most people have sites written in HTML, this advice is very useful in showing you how to minimise code and shrink pages.

Every byte counts – Think fast and small

Next he shows how to update pages from HTML to XHTML as well as how to deal with style sheets. He shows how to minimise file sizes as well as how to make the most of the latest CSS-2 conventions, such as replacing JavaScript with CSS-2 rollovers, and how to compress the instructions in the code.

For those who want to tackle really advanced techniques, he shows how JavaScripts can be compressed for speed and even scrambled (obfuscated) for security. He even shows his principles at work in a series of site make-overs.

The latter parts of the book deal with how to optimize graphics and minimize the size of multimedia files, and there’s a very good chapter on different forms of file compression.

For those like me who are a bit intimidated by the more advanced strategies, he also has lots of advice on improving your chances with the search engines by choosing meta-tags and keywords that count.

This is an excellent book for intermediate to advanced users – people who already have a web site, but who want to make it more efficient. Be prepared for a lot of work – but he shows you clearly what to do.

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Andrew B. King, Speed up your Site: Web Site Optimisation, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2003, pp.496, ISBN: 0735713243

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Subject to Change

July 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

creating products and services for an uncertain world

This book is about design theory for the digital age, and aspires to be read alongside Viktor Papanek’s Design for the Real Word and Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things or his ‘revised’ views in Emotional Design. It’s written by four guys from Jesse James Garrett’s company, Adaptive Path, and draws heavily on their work in what they call ‘experience design’. They are challenging conventional wisdoms of commercial practice in the light of the new digital possibilities. For instance, piling more and more features into a product may not be a good thing – as users of VCR machines will confirm. Neither will building a novelty if nobody has a use for it – as the Segway proved. Subject to Change proposes radical alternatives.

They suggest that designers must learn to empathise with the people whose interests they wish to serve. They should forget about consumers and learn to embrace the fact that the Customer is King. Their arguments stray into fields of business management, economics, and sales strategies – but they come back in the end to what these factors mean for design.

If there is a hidden sub-title to this work it’s “What is experience design?” – because the main thrust of their arguments is that whilst many companies have learned how to deliver a product, few of them have realised the importance of offering a rich and gratifying experience for their customers.

If there is a weakness, it’s a slightly Utopian notion that large businesses would allow experience design solutions policy to reach down to lower levels of company employees. It might be true that a postman or a sales clerk could offer a valuable suggestion for improving customer satisfaction – but can you imagine the directors of Royal Mail, British Gas, or – come to think of it – the government paying any attention? But of course, they would argue that this is the whole point of what they’re saying. It’s a shift in culture that’s required.

They are (quite rightly) great believers in the advantages of prototyping. James Dyson created more than 5,000 versions of his bagless vacuum cleaner before he came up with the definitive model. In fact they miss the opportunity to stress the huge advantages of prototyping in the digital world. A web site can be updated or remodeled unlike physical products such as cars or refrigerators, at virtually zero cost in no time at all by re-jigging a style sheet (CSS) or a content management system (CMS).

They are also advocates of ‘losing control’ – that is, giving customers (and even your competitors) access to tools to create their own experiences. The Internet world is littered with examples of companies who have made millions by giving away their product [Google, Linux, Mozilla]. It seems counter-intuitive, but that’s the way digital commerce works.

To conservatives, many of these ideas will seem quite impractical; but to anybody with even half a foot in the contemporary world of digital technology, they will seem like roadmaps to a New Future, employing methods which you might already be using – such as ‘managing with less’.

The latter part of the book becomes quite inspirational as they spell out their concept of ‘The Agile Manifesto’. This is a method of design and product development which does almost the exact opposite of conventional notions (which they call the ‘Waterfall Approach’). The only problem was that this section doesn’t carry any references to secondary sources – so it’s not possible to follow up their suggestions with any further reading.

Individuals and interactions	not	processes and tools
Working software	not	comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration	not	contract negotiation
Responding to change	not	following a plan

The authors all work for the same firm (Adaptive Path) and there’s quite a lot of unashamed trumpet-blowing about their success which has drawn down severe criticism from some reviewers. But if you can stomach this (or ignore it) the book offers some useful pointers in the world of design theory and the New eCommerce.

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Peter Merholz et al, Subject to Change, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2008, pp.178, ISBN: 0596516835

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The Art of SEO

October 31, 2010 by Roy Johnson

Mastering Search Engine Optimization

The Art of SEO seeks to explain an arcane issue. Search Engine Optimization is the art of getting more visitors to a web site. You can do this in a number of ways: by making it look more attractive, advertising its existence, or persuading more people to make links to it from their own sites. But the number one method which beats all of these put together is to make it come higher in Google search results. If somebody types washing machines into a Google search box and your site Wash-o-Matic comes up first, the chances are you will get more visitors. All you need to do is construct pages that Google will rank more highly than all your competitors – and this five hundred page compendium explains the equally large number of things you need to know to achieve it.

The book starts with a complete explanation of how search engines work, how they spider sites, and what they do with the information they gather. The same principles apply to all search engines, but the authors can be forgiven for concentrating almost all of their attention on Google, so predominant has it become. Quite apart from all the very technical matters of keywords and search algorithms, there’s a splendid chapter on creating a search engine friendly web site. This covers sitemaps, information architecture, site structure and navigation – all aimed at maximizing the effectiveness of every single page on a site. And you probably do need to start thinking of your site in this way – because that’s how your visitors will arrive, via a single page.

There are lots of free tools available – the best being at webmasters.google.com – but be prepared to go into a lot of technical detail if you wish to optimize your pages. I sat down and went through a number of the recommended steps, and after a while felt like scrapping my site and starting again from scratch. But in fact it’s very unlikely that any site starts out from a state of complete efficiency: they need to be tweaked and evolved to reach this condition. Fortunately on the issue of information architecture, many sites are now run from a content management system that will do the spadework for you. But it still pays to be aware of the underlying principles.

There are lots of subtle and complex issues – ‘keyword cannibalization’, ‘longtail of search’, and ‘thin affiliates’ – and something that had not occurred to me before – ‘self plagiarism‘. Two versions of the same page, even if they are on different parts of a site performing different functions, are dangerous as far as your rankings are concerned for two reasons. The first is that they are regarded by Google as duplicate material and are therefore given lower rating. The second is that the two pages are competing against each other for visitors, and Google will not know of any way to give priority to one of them.

The issue of creating, exchanging, and marketing links is complex almost beyond belief – but the principles on which the page ranking algorithms work is well explained. However, be warned that they are always ‘evolving’ – that is, changing. There’s also a warning on dubious promotional practices and an explanation of why many ‘guaranteed ranking improvement’ schemes aren’t worth a bean. The advice is to ignore all gimmicks, shortcuts, and sharp practice. Concentrate instead on producing lots of good quality content:

Content is at the heart of achieving link building nirvana

There’s an interesting discussion of how ‘link juice’ is generated, and some rather hair-raising warnings about link marketing. To stay on the safe side of Google acceptability policies, you are advised to run an extremely tight and clean ship indeed. Even some of the most innocent-seeming strategies for boosting the popularity or ranking of your pages can result in search engines doing the exact opposite, downgrading your page rankings behind the scenes – unbeknown to you.

In terms of promotion every course imaginable is examined – Google vertical search, local search, image, product and news search, plus all the well known social media services – Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, and so on. To do this as thoroughly as suggested would become a full time job for most site owners, but it’s possible to pick and mix, choosing those opportunities that will best suit your own business.

This leads to the art of SEO ‘campaigns’ in which goals and objectives are closely specified, then the results tracked, measured, and analysed. At this point you are dealing with the sharp end of analytics, and you need a combination of IT skills and commercial single-mindedness to stay the course.

The scariest part of all comes last. What do you do if somebody steals your site’s content? Or even worse, if a competitor reports you to Google and asks for your site to be de-listed? Both of these things can easily happen. Fortunately there’s guidance on how to deal with such situations – plus enormously long lists of things to avoid in order to stay out of trouble. These are all the seemingly innocuous tricks people use to increase their site rankings, such as ‘repurposing’ material from other people’s sites, embedding keywords in hidden text, buying popular keywords that are not related to the publisher’s site, using ‘entry pages’, and so forth. The advice – as ever – is to avoid these easily detectable tricks and stick to producing rich original content.

This is one of O’Reilly’s masterful publications that covers a single but enormously complex subject in a thorough and authoritative manner. It’s written by experts in the field of site promotion, and even though several authors are involved it has a consistent tone and approach that makes it both clear and surprisingly readable.

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Eric Enge et al, The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2010, pp.574, ISBN: 0596518862

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the eBay survival guide

May 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how to make money on eBay – and avoid losing your shirt

I rarely talk about computers when socialising – otherwise you easily get branded an IT bore. But I was at a dinner party recently with neighbours where it suddenly turned out that half the table were trading on eBay! There are amazing bargains to be had. It turned out that we were eating off antique plates the hostess had bagged to match up with family heirlooms. But for tender mortals like you and me, there needs to be some hand-holding through the jungle of bids, deadlines, and prospective bidding. That’s where guidance manuals such as eBay the smart way, eBay Hacks and the eBay survival guide come in.

Michael Banks is an experienced trader with twenty years of eCommerce experience, and he talks you through the basics in a friendly and encouraging manner. First he gives a clear account of the huge variety of services, downloads, and support materials at the eBay site, then explains how the auctions (and the sales) actually work . There are lots of different ways of trading, and he covers them all.

Then he shows you how to find things using eBay’s powerful search engine. This includes neat tricks such as including plurals and deliberate mis-spellings in your search terms.

He deals with the central issue of ‘How much is it worth?’ – which is a much easier question to ask than to answer. His advice is that you need to cross-check with other auctions of the same object; look into price guides; and track what other people are searching for and buying.

Selling items is a more complex business than buying – not because of eBay, but because more of your own time is tied up in handling and posting stock to customers. There are also lots of different ways to set a selling price: you can have a minimum, a reserve, and a buy-it-now price.

He shows you how to describe, display, and illustrate the goods you want to sell. This might sound fairly simple – but you’ve got to remember that you need to stand out from thousands of other sellers, and you’ve got to be completely accurate, otherwise you might get negative feedback.

eBay has a fairly detailed system of resolving complaints and offering protection for both buyers and sellers. If you’re worried about getting into difficulties, he explains quite clearly how to solve problems.

As a buyer, if you really have your heart set on securing a bargain, you might need to get into the skills of bidding at the last possible minute – or ‘sniping’ as it is known in the trade. Once again, he shows you how to do it, and even how to outwit other people who may be doing the same thing.

He finishes by showing you how to recognise scams and misleading descriptions of products for sale. Thanks to eBay’s gigantic database of information on its buyers, sellers, and the history of all their transactions, it’s possible to locate all the information you need to protect yourself.

It’s quite true that some people make a full time living just buying and selling on eBay. If you fancy putting your toes into the waters of eCommerce, this would be an excellent place to start.

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Michael Banks, the eBay survival guide, San Francisco: No Starch Press, 2005. ISBN: 1593270631

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The FaceBook Marketing Book

March 21, 2011 by Roy Johnson

using social media for eCommerce

FaceBook is both a media sensation and a mixed blessing. It has 500 million active users and half that number are thought to use the service every day. But some have found themselves out of a job or refused an interview when an employer checked through their unfettered postings or found ‘inappropriate’ photos in somebody’s albumns. It was originally a meet-up bulletin board system for college students, but like so many social media software programs it has outgrown its original purpose to become a major multi-purpose communication platform in its own right. The two authors of this guide are such enthusiasts for FaceBook that they argue it can be used as an effective marketing tool – and this is their quick guide which explains how to take advantage of the opportunities it offers.

First of all they show you how to set up a account profile, and what the various configuration details mean in terms of advantages and potential dangers. (Some people have courted problems and even physical attack by revealing their full postal address for instance.) Fortunately, it’s possible to fine tune your privacy settings to control who sees what – but this requires time, effort, and a fine sense of discrimination in knowing which one setting might over-ride another. All of these wrinkles are fully explained.

After the basics of creating a profile they move onto something I would guess nine out of every ten FaceBook users don’t even realise exists – a ‘Page’. This is something that gives you the opportunity to display a product, service, or brand that you wish to promote. This is where marketing starts to get serious. And it’s followed by the even more powerful feature of FaceBook groups, which allow you to set up a topic or an activity for discussion among interested parties. These can be used to include mention of your own products or services – but the authors underscore the warning that this can easily be perceived as spamming, and even lead in extreme cases to being banned from FaceBook because it contravenes their conditions of service.

This is also true of the next major feature they discuss – FaceBook events which can be used when you wish to invite users to the launch of a new product, a movie or theatre opening, or even a birthday celebration. [This feature has also been used recently for the far more serious business of mobilising supporters in the Middle Eastern uprisings.]

FaceBook also has its own system of applications (apps) – small programs that can make your efforts more powerful or wide-reaching. Moreover it also gives you the wherewithal to design your own if you come up with a new idea for promotion or engagement. They also show you how to customise your pages, how to use the share and like buttons to good effect, and how to write content that is likely to be shared by your visitors and followers.

By the time you reach the section on managing promotional campaigns and analysing the results, you’ll see that it’s obvious FaceBook (rather like WordPress) has gone from a piece of social media software to a full scale platform which offers all the tools and possibilities of a commercial web site.

They make is all seem very easy and almost automatically successful – by repeatedly mentioning large figures (250 million viewers) and big brands (Starbucks, IBM, Coca-Cola) they give the impression that you can market your local dog shampoo service just as successfully. And maybe you can. After all, the whole thing is completely free, and success for you might be not millions of ‘friends’ but simply a buck shee advert that draws in a few more dog washes a week. You’ve got nothing to lose.

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Dan and Alison Zarrella, The FaceBook Marketing Book, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2010, pp.272, ISBN: 1449388485

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The Long Tail

May 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how endless choice is creating unlimited demand

Chris Anderson is the editor of WIRED magazine. This book started as an article there, took off, and was expanded via seminars, speeches, and further research. It has now become one of the most influential essays on the new sCommerce. Anderson’s notion is relatively simple, but its implications profound. He argues that because the digitisation of commerce allows more people into the trading arena, and because minority goods can be made available alongside best-sellers, the consumer therefore has a much wider choice and cheaper prices. This gives rise to a new phenomena – niche markets – also known in marketing-speak as the ‘long tail’. This is the part of the commercial results graph where returns begin to flatten out and slope towards zero.

But – and this is a very big BUT – in the new digital world they don’t slope off completely. And if you add up all the income from these many tail end transactions, it can be more than the total sales from the Short Head part of the graph.

Once you have grasped these basic issues, the lessons are clear. The profit is to be made in shifting bits, not atoms, plus lower overheads means more profit, because you can sell more. Much of this is possible because the price of electronic storage has now dropped almost to zero, and digital distribution has removed transport costs – as well as making delivery immediate. A physical bricks-and-mortar store has limited shelf space to stock goods, but Peer-2-Peer file-sharers make the downloaders’ options almost limitless.

The only way to reach all the way down the Tail—from the biggest hits down to all the garage bands of past and present—is to abandon atoms entirely and base all transactions , from beginning to end, in the world of bits.

Much of the new digital economy is amazingly counter-intuitive. Amazon for instance has allowed its own competitors to sell their goods on its site. The net result – more profit for Amazon, and the rise of the small second-hand book trader – the very businesses people thought would be put out of work by online trading.

Other positive elements in the new digital economy are the rise of reader reviews and recommendations; the back catalogue becomes valuable again; and new niche markets become available for more buyers.

Anderson looks at the technological history which has made the long tail possible, using a typical Amazon purchase as a model: postal delivery service, standard ISBN numbers, credit cards, relational databases, and barcodes. Of course Amazon’s genius in its latest phase is it gets other people to hold all the stock and fulfil the orders.

He’s a great believer in reputations and taste being formed by social media – the YouTube and MySpace worlds in which personal recommendations and fan reviews help forge best-sellers more than any amount of advertising hype.

There are lots of interesting nuggets thrown out as he makes his way through the socio-economic implication of all this. Such as for instance the fact that Google searches counteract the tyranny of the New over the well-established. That’s because they rank pages by the number of incoming links, which favours those which have had the time to acquire them.

Even though he goes into some economic theory, the study remains accessible and readable throughout – largely because he uses everyday examples with which most readers will be able to identify: the purchase of music CDs, DVDs of films, and supermarket food purchases.

This is a really inspiring book, and a must for anyone remotely connected with the online world. Even if some of his estimations and predictions might be overstated, it offers a glimpse into processes taking place that will change the way we think about business and technology. Time and time again, I thought “Yes! I’ve already started doing that!” – ordering more books from Amazon’s marketplace traders, buying out-of-print titles at knockdown prices, exploring new music, and looking out for recommendations on the new social media. I would rank this book alongside Nicolas Negroponte’s 1996 study Being Digital as a seminal influence for the decade in which it is published.

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Chris Anderson, The Long Tail, London: Random House, 2006, pp.238, ISBN: 184413850X

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Web 2.0 – A Strategy Guide

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

successful Web 2.0 implementations

People who read Chris Anderson’s enormously influential The Long Tail will know that Web 2.0 has revolutionised eCommerce. Companies make more money by lowering their prices; they get rich by giving things away free of charge; and they invite their competitors to share information for mutual benefit. What is Web 2.0 exactly? And how does all this work? Well – Web 2.0 is the latest manifestation of web applications which allow its users to upload information and interact with each other, as well as downloading it, which we did with Web 1.0. And it is a technology which builds on economies of scale.

If your web site makes 1% profit from 250,000 visitors a week, imagine what happens if you start giving things away and get a million visitors. The chances are your profits will increase by 400%. Amy Shuen’s new book examines this phenomenon from a business point of view. She presents a series of case studies which illustrate the novel forces at work – and you don’t need to know the technical details of modern Internet technology to understand how it all operates.

Flickr, for instance, the photo-sharing service, rapidly generated a user base of two million users who uploaded 100 million photos. The setup costs for this business were very low (no shop, no physical stock) the service was free (Flickr made money from its premium services) and the customers were not only providing the inventory free of charge, but giving it added value by tagging the photos. Flickr was eventually bought by Yahoo! for $40 million, and it continues to prosper.

Shuen also draws on the strategic lessons from these entrepreneurial success stories. It doesn’t matter if you are a big time Web business or just running a one-person site, she asks “Do you allow your visitors to participate in your site? Can they share their own questions and ideas there?”

She has a chapter on Google that provides an interesting example of what’s called a ‘tippy market’. That’s when a company corners a certain percentage of the market which proves fatal for the competition. (The VHS/Betamax rivalry was a case in point). To reach this point Google paid a lot of money to AOL, but it tipped them over in active users to become the dominant search engine – a position which still holds today.

Next she looks at the social networking sites and explains how they establish their phenomenal growth rates. They all have features in common: they’re free; they grow by one subscriber recommending to friends; and as soon as they reach the tipping point they can generate huge incomes from advertising and selling web services. I also noticed that they tend to identify niche markets. Facebook is largely for college graduates keeping in touch; MySpace is for bands and artists publicising their work; and LinkedIn is for business people who want to find useful contacts.

Finally, she offers a five step approach to using Web 2.0 strategic thinking on your own business. This means applying the principles, rather than spending a fortune on complex software. She reminds us that a single extra line at the end of each Hotmail message – “Get your free email at http://www.hotmail.com” – was enough to give them a huge success in viral marketing.

And if all that’s not enough, she also provides two comprehensive bibliographies which list the key texts and resources – including papers from the Harvard Business School, where they practice Web 2.0 strategies by putting all their published research papers online at prices anybody can afford.

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Amy Shuen, Web 2.0 – A Strategy Guide, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2008, pp.243, ISBN: 0596529961

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Web Site Marketing Makeover

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how to make your Web site more usable – on a budget

Marcia Yudkin is offering here the sort of tips on Web site ‘usability’ made famous by Jakob Nielsen – but she does it in a gentler and less challenging manner. Few of the suggestions she makes in Web Site Marketing Makeover require any expenditure – just energy and intelligence. This is the latest title from TopFloor Publishing – who specialise in books which offer geek-free, common sense advice to people working on a budget. It will be ideal for people who want to improve an existing web site – and for those designing one who want to make it effective.

She goes into the fine details of Web enterprise – starting from such fundamental issues as the name of the site, the appearance of the home page, and the number and size of the items on it. All her suggestions are designed to promote maximum usability and user-oriented design. She is a supporter of the approach taken by Nielsen, Edward Tufte, and Steve Krug. She describes how to create useful navigational links: how to name them, group them logically, and display them in a way which will attract users without making the page ugly.

There’s an interesting chapter on how to create the writing which is going to do the bulk of the work of conveying what you have on offer to your visitors. Yudkin is drawing on her experience as an advisor to a wide variety of businesses, and the examples she cites range from non-profit-making organisations, individual entrepreneurs and consultants, to big organisations such as finance companies and e-commerce giants.

Almost every page carries screenshots showing negative as well as positive examples to illustrate the advice she offers – and she is brave enough to talk you through her own makeovers of commercial sites.

For those interested in hard e-commerce, there is plenty on forms, subscription systems, payments, and how to build the confidence and trust of the customer. But typical readers are likely to be those working to a budget – and they will appreciate her pointers towards free resources in every section. These really are impressive in their range – free content, software, services, graphics, fonts, advice – even free e-commerce shopping trolleys.

This is another excellent addition to TopFloor’s Poor Richard series – worth it alone for the superb annotated listing of recommended books and Web resources.

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Marcia Yudkin, Poor Richard’s Web Site Marketing Makeover, Lakewood CO: TopFloor Publishing, 2001, pp.249, ISBN: 1930082169

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Web Site Measurement Hacks

July 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

tips and tools to help optimise your online business

If you take a serious interest in your web site, once you’ve got over the obsession with how it looks, you’ll want to know how it performs. And if it includes any element of e-commerce, you’ll undoubtedly want to know how to improve that performance. Eric Peterson’s guide Web Site Measurement Hacks is a technical guide to doing that by measuring what is going on – and that means hard figures, the number of visitors you get, and what they do when they arrive at your site.

The first and most important thing is to know the definition of terms in this arcane world – to know the difference between ‘hits’, ‘visitors’, and ‘unique page views’ for instance. He explains these issues really well, and emphasises that you need to understand the technical details if you want to increase your site traffic. Although some of his suggestions are aimed at businesses with big money to spend on web site optimisation, I was glad to see that he included the cheap and even free options available for small and start-up entrepreneurs. This includes programs such as Analog, which I have used myself in the past.

He explains how to understand and analyse web logfiles, and how to get a more accurate picture of which human beings are visiting your site by excluding from the results robot searches and other data which has been pulled from cache. For those who are really technologically ambitious, there are instructions on how to build your own web measurement application, along with the necessary core code and the location of free downloadable add-ons.

As the book progresses it becomes more technical. First he deals with JavaScript page tags, then how to use one-pixel hidden graphic ‘bugs’ to learn more about what visitors do on your site. He also covers learning from errors – that is, understanding (and rectifying) the broken links and the pages which are not delivered on request to your visitors.

After that, he switches to explaining the details of online marketing. This involves a close examination of terms such as ‘click through rate’ and ‘cost per conversion’, as well as how to measure the effectiveness of banner advertising.

Most of his recommendations are sound. On the optimization of web page size he mentions the free service offered by Andy King (author of Speed Up Your Site). I ran a few pages from the site you are visiting now through his analyzer and learned a lot about possible improvements.

The later stages of usability become more and more complex. The hacks he discusses here are for people with serious e-commerce ambition who are prepared to spend time and money on making their site(s) more effective. They include features such as measuring the demographics of your site visitors, analysing their behaviour patterns, and gathering data on their engagement with the retail process.

This is a book which deals with both the technical issues of maintaining your Web’s infrastructure and the business implications of interpreting the data it generates. It’s a technology companion that any serious web entrepreneur will welcome.

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Eric T. Peterson, Web Site Measurement Hacks, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2005, pp.405, ISBN: 0596009887

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Website Optimization

July 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

speed, search engine, and conversion rate secrets

Andy King scored a big hit in 2003 with his first book Speed Up Your Site. It’s a guide which still has its own live web site where you can analyse the effectiveness of your web pages. His latest magnum opus Website Optimization goes way beyond that in scope and depth. It’s a guide to maximising every aspect of a website and its performance. It’s an amazingly practical manual, with page after page of ideas, suggestions, and strategies for getting your pages more widely known and read.

On the whole, it’s not too technical, and he supplies snippets of code only when necessary. All the tips are within the grasp of anyone who is used to running a web site, and along the way he explains the principles of search engine optimization (SEO) as well as briefing you on how SEs treat your site. This is an up-to-date account of how search engines such as Yahoo and Google rank your pages and deal with search requests. He also presents real-life case studies in which he shows ‘before and after’ makeovers of professional sites. These are most instructive in that the ‘before’ pages look attractive and professional enough – until their underlying weaknesses are analysed and rectified. The improvements give what are claimed as up to fifty times more site visitors per day, and in the case of a cosmetic dentist the need to employ more staff and move to bigger offices in Philadelphia.

The first half of the book deals with search engine marketing optimization, which can be expensive as one enters the world of paid advertising. But the second concentrates on things which anyone can do and afford – making pages smaller, lighter, and faster by trimming off the surplus fat. In an age of faster and faster broadband connections, web users are simply not prepared to wait more than a couple of seconds for a page to appear – so you’ve got to make important pages lean and speedy:

Web page optimization streamlines your content to maximise display speed. Fast display speed is the key to success with your website. It increases profits, decreases costs, and improves customer satisfaction (not to mention search engine rankings, accessibility, and maintainability).

All of these issues are dealt with in detail – and I particularly liked the fact that he was prepared to repeat some of the techniques when they occurred in different contexts. It’s not always easy to grasp some of these technologies in one simple pass. Especially as – in the case of optimizing images – he explains no less than sixteen possibilities for cutting file size and speeding up downloads.

He’s also keen on the optimization of style sheets and shows an amazing variety of techniques for creating what he calls ‘CSS Architecture’. Here too there are no less than ten strategies explained which offer cleaner, tighter, coding and the use of structural markup to beat browser peculiarities and rendering delays.

Most of his explanations are clearly articulated, but occasionally he lapses into less than elegant repetition and jargon, which could deter the inexperienced:

By converting old-style nonsemantic markup into semantic markup, you can more easily target noncontiguous elements with descendant selectors.

Fortunately, this sort of thing only happens occasionally.
There are some very nifty tricks for creating buttons and rollover techniques using style sheets, which saves the time to download a graphic files button, and thus once again speeds up page rendering.

He puts in two chapters on advanced web performance and optimizing JavaScipt and Ajax on your site which I have to admit went beyond my technical competence. But then it’s back to terra firma with understanding the metrics of your site’s performance – that is, knowing how to analyse the statistical data returned by website analysers such as Google’s Analytics and WebTrends.

I’ve never been able to understand before what page ‘bounce rate’ was until it was explained here – and I was astonished when I saw the results from some of my own pages!

As the search for more detailed information and for planning campaigns goes on – so the process becomes more like a science. There are graphs and formulae scattered around these pages to prove this. It’s the same for Pay Per Click advertising (PPC). All I can say is that if you are in this league, Andy King is your friend, and his advice is here thick on the ground to help you.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Andrew King, Website Optimization, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2008, pp.367, ISBN: 0596515081

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