Grab your hammer and join me in the Website Workshop

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what would be the best way for us to explore together the many different techniques of website optimization. I think I’ve found an approach that should be a bit of fun for everyone.

Let’s optimize a website together!

In this series, I am going to build a website step-by-step that we can use as a central point of discussion for website optimization. This will be an entirely public project and I will keep coming back to this series over time. I’m hoping that by using concrete illustrations, it will make the process of building and optimizing a website easier to understand.

While it really stretches beyond actual optimization, I think it is useful for me to start at the very beginning and build a website from scratch. There are still some people with static websites that might be interested in taking the plunge and moving to a new platform. Starting from square one will give me the opportunity to talk about that and the many other decisions that go into making a quality website.

Now, here is how I can really use your help on this one…

This is a café, not a classroom

I named this blog the Website Optimization Café because I want to encourage coffeehouse-style discussion and debate. Website optimization is not an exact science, and I don’t know it all. While I hope you can learn something from me along the way, I know that I’ll learn a lot from your comments and I’ll be reading them very closely.

This is not going to be near as much fun without hearing what you have to say. Please feel free to comment, and I will do my best to answer any questions that you may have. As way of honoring your contributions, I’m going to make a credits page in the new website so that I can thank and link to the Top 20 readers that I feel have made a significant contribution to the discussion over the course of this project.

The lazy way to build a website

Don’t expect any kind of rush here – I’m not sure how long this is going to take, but I want to make sure that I cover every significant aspect that I can think of along the way. Given the length of time involved this is going to give me an excellent opportunity to highlight changes in technology that impact website optimization along the way.

Interested in joining me in the café? Subscribe to the RSS feed and keep up to date with the latest.

UPDATE: The Website Workshop is taking shape over at Bizquarium. Sign up for the RSS feed at Bizquarium to stay up to date.