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WebReference.com Reviews Website Optimization Book

Internet.com has published a review of my new book, Website Optimization. WebReference.com, where the author was founder and managing editor, posted a review praising the new book.

Lee Underwood, who took over for me as Managing Editor when I left WebReference.com, wrote:

“King’s new book is all about maximizing the return on the client’s investment in their Web site. It focuses on increasing conversion rates, and optimizing the site for search engines as well as speed. And it does a great job of it. The book is filled with case studies and examples, along with valuable tips and techniques for increasing the speed of your Web site, along with its conversion rate.”

Underwood correctly points out that I was constantly tweaking websites for speed and experimenting with extreme HTML optimization to shrink web pages and boost performance. In fact, internally we had a contest to see who could shrink the home page of WebReference.com the most. My goal was to take at least one byte a day off the home page, and continually improve the load time and size of the site. We tried all sorts of things while I was there, including creating a hybrid Perl/DHTML News Harvester that overlaid a DHTML news flipper on top of static headlines, all drawn in through RSS feeds and CRON jobs. By shunting more work to the server, we were able to shrink the amount of code necessary for the XHTML, and let the sever do more of the work on the backend.

Note that some of the techniques shown in the previous article and my first book did push the envelope a bit further than some web standards advocates would have liked. However, the days of breaking web standards for faster speed are behind us with the widespread adoption of CSS, and we strictly adhere to that standard in the newest book.

To read the full review see:

Book Review: Website Optimization