Welcome back! I'm excited and honored to announce that I am going to the be author of a new book called 'Website Optimization - An Hour a Day'! Learn More About the Book

Being Christmas and nearly the end of the year already (wow, 2008 flew by…) I thought I would round up some great blog posts from website optimization experts from around the web that will help you improve and optimize your website. There are some great minds out there that you can learn from – I know I have! So, here are my favorite website optimization blog posts of 2008…

1: The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for the Home Page
Too many homepages are poorly optimized, which is a terrible thing considering its often a visitors first impression of a website. Stoney deGeyter wrote a really great checklist full of ideas for helping to improving home page. A must read.

2: 25 Web Form Optimization Tips
Badly designed forms can often be a major cause of poorly optimized websites. Justin Palmer discusses some great tips to help reduce these problems.

3: Speed Up Your Website
Even thought high speed internet connections are now very common, many websites still suffer from slow performance issues – often driving your website visitors away. Alex Cohen discusses some great ways to help speed up your site.

4: Experiment or Die. Five Reasons and Awesome Testing Ideas
Testing plays such a key part in the optimization of any website. The analytics guru himself, Avinash Kaushik, gives some great advice on why you should test, and offers some great testing ideas.

5: Check Your Site Usability With These Fun Tools
Bad website usability plays a major factor in a badly optimized website. But just how can you find out how good your website usability is? Ann Smarty wrote a great revealing some cool tools to help you find how usable your website is…

6: 5 Rules for Quality Landing Page Design
Billy at Widemile discusses some more usual, great practices for helping to improve and optimize your landing pages. Very revealing!

7:  The Value of a Unique Value Proposition
If you offer no good reason for a visitor to use your website rather than a competitors,  then it really doesn’t matter how good your website is. Thats why its essential to develop a unique value proposition to help optimize your website.

8: 17 Rules for Successful Ecommerce Sites
There are many, many different ways to help improve ecommerce websites and therefore increase your sales revenue. SEOmoz reveals 17 great rules!

9: Losing Customers at the Register: 12 Checkout Blunders
A surefire way to lose a website visitor before making a sale is by having a poorly optimized shopping cart. Here are 12 common mistakes you should avoid.

10: 7 Ways to Measure and Improve Your Website
Alex Cohen gives some unique perspective on not just improving your website, but how to go about measuring your website most effectively.

So there we have it – after reading these 10 great blog posts from website experts, you should be in much better shape to start optimizing your website!

Oh, and Happy Christmas to everyone and have a truly optimized New Year!