Thank You (2010 Edition)

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Chris Coyier on (Updated on )

It’s been a tradition for years now around here for me to do a year-end wrap-up. It’s a great way of reflecting on the year, sharing some random interesting statistics, and most importantly, saying thank you to everyone who comes to this site.

Thank You

I don’t say it often enough, but thanks to all the people who come to this site. Hopefully you come here to learn or reference something and that’s useful to you, but of course that’s also useful to me, as running a popular site has obvious benefits.

Thank you to AdPacks for serving the ads on my demo pages. They are a subsidiary of BuySellAds, who still serves all other ads on the site and makes my life way easier.

Thanks to all the current advertisers: PSD2HTML, CodeCanyon, FreshBooks, Site5, FlippingBook, SiteGrinder, XHTMLWeaver, FoxyCart, SendLoop, WPCoder, and Elegant Themes.

Thank you Media Temple for the hosting.

Thank you Typekit for the custom web fonts.

Thank you to NetDNA for the content delivery.

Thank you to IGN for the video hosting.

Milestones

Redesigns

There have been two redesigns this year, from v7 rolled out in August and v8 this December. I’m extremely happy with v8 still. One of my favorite little touches is how search results come in without page reload. The biggest lingering issue is some PC font rendering stuff that I hope to be able to solve somehow yet. The bold colors aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but they are my cup of tea.

Forums

The forums were transferred from phpBB to Vanilla. They are easier to use and administer and have less spam. The design fits nicely into the rest of the site I think. After the update, the forums are now seeing double the traffic they used to. However it’s still fairly low compared to the rest of the site. For instance, in the last month the entire forums have seen about 66,000 pageviews across all pages combined while the single most popular article this month saw about 82,000. Over the course of the year, the forums as a whole are 4% of total site traffic. I’d like to see that grow in the coming year and I’m sure it will. Seeing people get direct personal help there is awesome.

Wufoo

I worked over half the year at Wufoo. It’s an unbelievably great job. I work with great people on a great product where my job duties are flexible and perfectly suited to me. More importantly, I’ve made great friends of my co-workers. This job has taken me to Tampa, Florida, which was a big move. My life in Florida is much better than it was in Chicago thanks to my new friends there (including my new puppy Digby) and my more spacious home.

Simplification

Over the past few years I’ve gotten busier and busier. There were times of serious stress where I was spending time on things I didn’t really want to be. I feel like I’ve gotten better in the last year about keeping my life simplified and only working on things I want to be. I plan to defend this better life management vigorously and hopefully get even better at it.

Statistics

  • This is the 753rd post. There are 396 snippets and 94 screencasts for a total of 1,243 unique bits of content.
  • There are 31,613 comments which makes an average of 25 comments per piece of content, although there are pages with hundreds of comments and some with none.
  • There has been a 77% increase in visits compared to last year, with an 11% drop in time spent on site per visitor.
  • The homepage is the most visited page on the site. Of the total 25 million pageviews through the year, 2.8 million of them where to the homepage, which is about 11.5%.
  • There were about 11 million “entrances” to the site, of which 2 million were to the homepage. That means over 4/5 of the traffic to this site enters via a “deep link.”
  • Search engines provide 44% of all traffic, referring sites 34%, and 20% direct. 2% is “other” whatever that means in Google Analytics world.
  • The top referring sites are 1) Google 2) Smashing Magazine 3) Web Design Ledger 4) 1st Web Designer 5) Twitter
  • The most popular non-article section of the site is the downloads area which represents about 3.5% of traffic. The demo pages themselves have 6.3 million pageviews which is about 25% of traffic.
  • RSS feed subscribers, according to Feedburner, are hovering right at about 65,000. There were about 40,000 this time last year, meaning we’ve added 25,000 people this year, which is far more than subscribed in total in 2007.

The Future

As every year, I’m excited for the next! No huge secret plans. I’m mostly excited just to continue learning about design and sharing that stuff here. Working on this site is always a great pleasure for me.

I’m tossing around the idea of doing a CSS-Tricks book. I have a few ideas for that I’m trying to decide between. I feel it’s pretty likely that’ll happen in 2011, but no particular promises.

I know screencasts have been few and far between lately. They were losing steam big time for over a year even when I was doing them regularly. I’m sure that contributed to my slowing down on them, even though I like to think that’s not why. I still plan to keep up with them, but will likely be later in January when I kick them back up. I have a big ol’ list of ideas I think would be good ones.

That’ll do it for this year’s wrap up, see ya’ll next year!