Website Optimization, a book by Andrew B. King

This time I’m reviewing a book by Andy King. Unlike High Performance website by Steve Souders, it doesn’t solely focus on the speed side of optimization, but it adds the art of Search Engine Optimization to form a compelling mix in a single book.

If you have a website that underperforms your expectations, this single book can be your one-stop shop to get all the knowledge you need.

Andy uses interesting examples of how he succeeded in improving his clients’ pages that illustrate well what he describes in theory before. He not only focuses on how to make your website show up at high ranks in search engines (what he calls “natural SEO”), but also discusses in detail how to use pay per click (PPC) ads to drive even more people to one’s site. I especially liked how Andy describes how to find the best keywords to pick and also describes how to monitor success of PPC.

The part about the optimization for speed feels a little too separated in the book. It is a good read and provides similar content as Steve Souders book, though the level of detail feels a little awkward considering how different the audience for the SEO part of the book is. Still, programmers can easily get deep knowledge about how to get that page load fast.

Unfortunately Andy missed out a little on bringing this all into the grand picture. Why would I want to follow not only SEO but also optimize the speed of the page? There is a chapter meant to “bridge” the topics, but it turns out to be about how to properly do statistics and use the correct metrics. Important, but not enough to really connect the topics (and actually I would have expected this bridging beforehand).

Altogether I would have structured things a little different. For example: It’s the content that makes search engines find the page and makes people return to a page, yet Andy explains how to pick the right keywords for the content first whereas he tells the reader how to create it only afterwards.
Everything is there, I had just hoped for a different organization of things.

All in all, the book really deserves the broad title “Website Optimization.” Other books leave out SEO which usually is the thing that people mean when they want to optimize their websites (or have them optimized).

I really liked that the topics are combined a book and I highly recommend the book for everyone who wants to get his or her website in shape.

The book has been published by O’Reilly in July 2008, ISBN 9780596515089. Also take a look at the Website Optimization Secrets companion site.

Thanks to Andy for providing me a review copy of this book.

Upgrade WordPress Script

Whenever a new version of WordPress comes out (as just WordPress 2.6 did), it is somewhat of a pain to upgrade it.

But not for me anymore, because I have created a small (and simple) script some versions ago which I would like to share with you.


$ cat upgrade_wordpress.sh
wget http://www.wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
mv www wordpress
tar --overwrite -xzf latest.tar.gz
rm latest.tar.gz
mv wordpress www

www is my document root and the script sits outside of it. It downloads the most recent version, extracts it while overwriting the already existing files. The script doesn’t contain anything extra-ordinary, but makes upgrading real easy.

Of course this script is only useful if you have ssh access to your web server, but if you do that script might ease the (almost too frequent) pain of upgrading WordPress.