Watching Websites is a book that Alistair and I are writing. If I had to summarize the book in three words, I’d say, “complete web visibility.”
But there’s a lot more to it than three words can easily explain.
I know there’s something wrong with my site. But I’m fed up with fixing whatever just broke. I’m fed up with my own users telling me when things are slow. I’m fed up with trying to figure out where people are getting stuck, or why they can’t do something. And I have neither the money nor the patience to keep playing whack-a-mole and guessing what’s going to break next. I need to know what to watch, and how to watch it, so I’m not caught by surprise.
I know my community is out there, but I’m hard pressed to find good information on who they are, what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it. Just like you, reading the page right now. Seriously, who are you? (No, really, tell me. Srlsy.) I mean, I know I’m being talked about (maybe by you!) and it’d be sorta nice to join that conversation.
I also know my competitors are up to nefarious mischief. I’d like to know what they’re plotting. I’m tired of being the last guy at the party to know that they’ve just launched a product like mine.
See how I bolded three words there? Ohhyea. That’s the point of the book: Complete visibility of every website that can affect your business: Your own, your communities’, and your competitors.
But enough about us; let’s talk about you.
You probably know you need to see what’s going on with your website. But explaining why you need that visibility to your boss, your company, or your investors is frustrating. You’ve probably searched a bit for solutions, but there’s no holistic framework to fit them in. So you have siloes of technology, spray-painted all sorts of enticing colors by vendors’ marketing departments. You’re probably tired of finding out that your latest fixes didn’t work, or had unintended consequences, or just made things worse. And you probably have too much data at your fingertips, but too few ideas of how to use it or which numbers really matter.
In Watching Websites, we’ll cover:
- What kinds of businesses exist on the web, and how that affects their monitoring strategies.
- What big questions you need to answer about your own site. (Spoiler alert–There are four: What did my users do? Could they do it? Why did they do it? How did they do it?)
- A deep dive into the monitoring technologies that answer those questions, including web analytics, device monitoring, synthetic testing, real user monitoring (RUM), web interaction analytics (WIA), Voice of the Customer (VOC), competitive monitoring, and community monitoring.
- A frank talk about the tools that are out there (from the free ones to the really really expensive ones), and why some are awesome and others suck.
- Maturity models. Fancy-pants words for a “game plan” that tells you how to get from where you are today to where you want to be.
- Tons of anecdotes from people like you. Technology books are boring! They become much more fun when you fill them with trainwrecks, horror stories, and told-you-so, it-could-never-happen-here narratives. (Feel like sharing? Like we said, we want to hear about it.
Hopefully, it’ll also have a balance of useful insight, healthy irreverence, and straight talk.
But let’s talk about what the book isn’t. It’s not a web analytics book. It’s not going to be an operational manual. I won’t teach you how to install Nagios, and Alistair won’t show you how to design a user-monitoring packet sniffing device. That would be kind of creepy, anyway. It’s also not a theoretical book. This isn’t a thesis (I couldn’t be farther away from a Ph.D if I tried). Finally, this book does not teach you how build an online business. It teaches you how to monitor it, so that you can excel using the great resources that are out there already.
We see this book as the ultimate companion to some of the greatest writing and blogging on the subject of web visibility. That means sites from folks like Dave McClure and his pirates! It means Avinash and what he’s been saying about simple, meaningful metrics that cut through the noise (and we want to tie his awesome book on analytics to factors like usability and performance. Steve Souders and Cal Henderson did an amazing job at telling us how to make sites faster and build scalable sites; we want to show you how to prove it worked, and make that part of a systemic monitoring process.
You might be a CEO. Maybe you’re into startups and serial entrepreneurship. Or perhaps you’ve got a monitoring team under you in a Fortune 500 company. This is an O’Reilly book that’s actually being written with you in mind.
On the other hand, you might be a web analyst hungry to learn about the other monitoring silos. Perhaps you’re a web operations jock(ette) that’s been tasked with knowing “if the website is doing ok”. Maybe you run the load-balancers, or the EC2 instances, and you just want to know more about what’s going on. Now what? Start Watching Websites.
Alistair and I have been thinking about this stuff for a while. I’ve been flipping back and forth doing online community and operational stuff. Alistair has been busy starting companies, writing books, and running conferences. We both love numbers, metrics, KPIs, and actionable results a bit too much. And we want to share what we’ve learned from you with everyone else, both online (here) and in the book
If you have any questions, you can find out how to reach us here.
