About Site Advice

What this site is

Site Advice turns years of hands-on web experience into a practical checklist any owner can follow — especially if, like most small-business owners, you never set out to run a website but ended up responsible for one. No logins, no lead-gen funnels: just clear advice you can read and apply yourself, or use to brief a web professional with confidence.

Where the tips came from

The original "40 website optimization tips" are Jochen's own. He devised and wrote the list years ago as a step-by-step guide to building a site from scratch — and always meant to turn it into a book. The book never happened, but the tips have proven durable: the core ideas — own a good domain, secure your mail, be reachable, write for humans and search engines alike — have aged remarkably well.

What hasn't aged well is the detail. Advice about hit counters, browser-sniffing and analog log parsers belongs in a museum. So every tip here has been rewritten from scratch for today: HTTPS everywhere, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, WebP and responsive images, privacy-friendly analytics, GDPR, structured data and realistic promotion. Where the old advice was still right, we kept it and modernized the examples. Where it was obsolete, we dropped it.

The web has also grown new essentials since the list was written — accessibility, mobile and touch usability, tested backups, uptime and certificate monitoring, security headers, data minimization and more. So the original forty have grown to fifty, and each tip now carries a lifecycle label (plan, build, launch, operate, review) because a modern website is never really "finished".

Who maintains it

Site Advice is run by euregio.net — Jochen's web agency (web hosting, design, consulting, programming, marketing and training), which has built and hosted sites for small businesses across the Euregio region for three decades. The site itself is deliberately built the way it preaches: a single lean stylesheet, semantic HTML, accessible color contrast in both light and dark themes, fast flat-file pages, no cookies of its own, and no third-party tracking or analytics — just a minimal, privacy-friendly server log with truncated IPs.

Spotted something out of date, or have a tip we should add? Get in touch — we read every message.