For a number of years, I have owned three very popular domain names: WebPerformance.org, WebCaching.org, and WebCompression.org. Last night, after many days of consideration, I stopped pointing them at their own distinct Web space and pointed them at this blog.

This is not a bad or evil thing, considering that for at least 18 months, the articles that were hosted at those sites were duplicated here in a more manageable format.

For those who have come looking for the content from those sites, it is here. The search box in the right column can help you locate it.

But for those who would like a refresher, here is a list of the most popular articles on this blog, as selected by Web performance traffic.

Web Performance Concepts Series

• Web Performance, Part I: Fundamentals
• Web Performance, Part II: What are you calling ‘average’?
• Web Performance, Part III: Moving Beyond Average
• Web Performance, Part IV: Finding The Frequency
• Web Performance, Part V: Baseline Your Data
• Web Performance, Part VI: Benchmarking Your Site
• Web Performance, Part VII: Reliability and Consistency
• Web Performance, Part VIII: How do you define fast?
• Web Performance, Part IX: Curse of the Single Metric

Why Web Measurement Series

• Why Web Measurement, Part I: Customer Generation
• Why Web Measurement, Part II: Customer Retention
• Why Web Measurement, Part III: Business Operations
• Why Web Measurement, Part IV: Technical Operations

Web Performance Tuning

• The Dichotomy of the Web: Andy King’s Website Optimization
• Performance Improvement From Compression
• Baseline Testing With cURL
• Compressing Web Output Using mod_deflate and Apache 2.0.x
• Compressing PHP Output
• Using Client-Side Cache Solutions And Server-Side Caching Configurations To Improve Internet Performance
• Performance Improvement From Caching and Compression
• Compressing Web Output Using mod_gzip for Apache 1.3.x and 2.0.x
• mod_gzip Compile Instructions
• Hacking mod_deflate for Apache 2.0.44 and lower

IP Tracking

• Geographic IP database using PERL, PHP and MySQL — UPDATE: September 16 2008
• Hit Tracking with PHP and MySQL

When starting with new clients, finding the low-hanging fruit of Web performance is often the simplest thing that can be done. By recommending a few simple configuration changes, these early stage clients can often reap substantial Web performance improvement gains.

The harder problem is that it is hard for organizations to build on these early wins and create an ongoing culture of Web performance improvement. Stripping away the simple fixes often exposes deeper, more base problems that may not have anything to do with technology. In some cases, there is no Web performance improvement process simply because of the pressure and resource constraints that are faced.

In other cases, a deeper, more profound distrust between the IT and Business sides of the organization leads to a culture of conflict, a culture where it is almost impossible to help a company evolve and develop more advanced ways of examining the Web performance improvement process.

I have written on how Business and IT appear, on the surface, to be a mutually exclusive dichotomy in my review of Andy King’s Website Optimization. But this dichotomy only exists in those organizations where conflict between business and technology goals dominate the conversation. In an organization with more advanced Web performance improvement processes, there is a shared belief that all business units share the same goal.

So how can a company without a culture of Web performance improvement develop one?

What can an organization crushed between limited resources and demanding clients do to make sure that every aspect of their Web presence performs in an optimal way?

How can an organization where the lack of transparency and the open distrust between groups evolve to adopt an open and mutually agreed upon performance improvement process?

Experience has shown me that a strong culture of Web performance improvement is built on three pillars: Targets, Measurements, and Involvement.

Targets

Setting a Web performance improvement target is the easiest part of the process to implement. it is almost ironic that it is also the part of the process that is the most often ignored.

Any Web performance improvement process must start with a target. It is the target that defines the success of the initiative at the end of all of the effort and work.

If a Web performance improvement process does not have a target, then the process should be immediately halted. Without a target, there is no way to gauge how effective the project has been, and there is no way to measure success.

Measurements

Key to achieving any target is the ability to measure the success in achieving the target. However, before success can be measured, how to measure success must be determined. There must be clear definitions on what will be measured, how, from where, and why the measurement is important.

Defining how success will be measured ensures transparency throughout the improvement process. Allowing anyone who is involved or interested in the process to see the progress being made makes it easier to get people excited and involved in the performance improvement process.

Involvement

This is the component of the Web performance improvement process that companies have the greatest difficulty with. One of the great themes that defines the Web performance industry is the openly hostile relationships between IT and Business that exist within so many organizations. The desire to develop and ingrain a culture of Web performance improvement is lost in the turf battles between IT and Business.

If this energy could be channeled into proactive activity, the Web performance improvement process would be seen as beneficial to both IT and Business. But what this means is that there must be greater openness to involve the two parts of the organization in any Web performance improvement initiative.

Involving as many people as is relevant requires that all parts of the organization agree on how improvement will be measured, and what defines a successful Web performance improvement initiative.

Summary

Targets, Measurements, and Involvement are critical to Web performance initiatives. The highly technical nature of a Web site and the complexities of the business that this technology supports should push companies to find the simplest performance improvement process that they can. What most often occurs, however, is that these three simple process management ideas are quickly overwhelmed by time pressures, client demands, resource constraints, and internecine corporate warfare.

The Web is a many-splendored thing, with a very split personality. One side is drive to find ways to make the most money possible, while the other is driven to implement cool technology in an effective and efficient manner (most of the time).

Andy King, in Website Optimization (O’Reilly), tries to address these two competing forces in a way that both can understand. This is important because, as we all know from our own lives, most of the time these two competing parts of the same whole are right; they just don’t understand the other side.

I have seen this trend repeated throughout my nine years in the Web performance industry, five years as a consultant. Companies torn asunder, viewing the Business v. Technology interaction as a Cold War, one that occasionally flares up in odd places which serve as proxies between the two.

Website Optimization appears at first glance to be torn asunder by this conflict. With half devoted to optimizing the site for business and the other to performance and design optimization, there will be a cry from the competing factions that half of this book is a useless waste of time.

These are the organizations and individuals who will always be fighting to succeed in this industry. These are the people and companies who don’t understand that success in both areas is critical to succeeding in a highly competitive Web world.

The first half of the book is dedicated to the optimization of a Web site, any Web site, to serve a well-defined business purpose. Discussing terms such as SEO, PPC, and CRO can curdle the blood of any hardcore techie, but they are what drive the design and business purpose of a Web site. Without a way to get people to a site, and use the information on the site to do business or complete the tasks that they need to, there is no need to have a technological infrastructure to support it.

Conversely, a business with lofty goals and a strategy that will change the marketplace will not get a chance to succeed if the site is slow, the pages are large, and design makes cat barf look good. Concepts such HTTP compression, file concatenation, caching, and JS/CSS placement drive this side of the personality, as well as a number of application and networking considerations that are just too far down the rat hole to even consider in a book with as broad a scope as this one.

Although on the surface, the concepts discussed in this book will see many people put it down as it isn’t business or techie enough, those who do buy the book will show that they have a grasp of the wider perspective, the one that drives all successful sites to stand tall in a sea of similarity.

See the Website Optimization book companion site for more information, chapter summaries and two sample chapters.

They are already compressed. I wrote about this here, and the folks at Port80 Software remind you not to here.

Andy King has tips on how to compress the somposition of PDFs. [here]