Thank You (2012 Edition)

I always feel a huge, hearty “THANK YOU” is in order at the end of the year. Especially this year, since this is the first year I’ve been able to go out “on my own” entirely thanks to you and the support you’ve shown the site. The highest of fives to you.

And now for the annual goal review and statistics dump. We’ve done this in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 if you’re interested in a trip down memory lane.

Statistics

I wrote 291 posts in 2012, a 10% increase in volume from last year. 160 (55%) of those were link posts compared to 45% last year, so probably roughly the same amount of full blog posts.

There is now a total of 1,312 blog posts, 1,046 pages (includes public screencasts, snippets, and almanac), and 352 gallery screenshots.

Akismet has blocked 196,782 spam comments from this site. That mark was at 102,977 last year, meaning in just one year there were nearly as many spam comments blocked as in the first four years combined. That’s kind of disturbing. There have been 54,420 legit comments posted, so about 3 out of 4 comments is spam.

RSS subscribers peaked out at 100,699. That means we gained about 17,800 this year compared to a growth of 18,000 last year. Very slight slowing in growth, but still, 18% growth is pretty damn good.

I have received 11,472 messages from the contact form on this site. 3,097 of them were from this year (27% of them, 8.5/day). The most common choice for “Regarding” (a required choice on the form) is “Something Awesome” which… is awesome.

I get around 100 emails a day, which I find manageable most of the time.

I only did 9 videos this year, which is way too few and rather embarrassing. I’ll make that a goal for next year to do more. However, if you factor in that I did 158 videos for The Lodge, I actually more than doubled the inventory.

There are 19,178 threads in the forums this year, 5,945 from this year (although if I paginate back I only see 4,180, not sure what’s up with that, perhaps deleted spam threads factor in). Anecdotally, the forums seem more active than they have ever been. Big thanks to the moderators there. Great work as always, team!

There were 53 million pageviews in 2012 compared to 38.4 last year, a 38% increase in traffic.

It’s rather amazing how identical traffic was year over year. Returning vs. New was exactly the same as last year at 51% vs 49% respectively. 55% of traffic came from search again. The top three referral sites were again 1) 1stwebdesigner, 2) Smashing Magazine, 3) Web Design Ledger.

Twitter sends 46% more traffic to the site than Facebook. I’m surprised it’s not more really, since I’m quite active on Twitter and barely at all on Facebook.

Chrome was the most popular browser with 47% of traffic which is up from 34% last year. Firefox was in second at 33% (42% last year). Safari and Opera stayed steady at 11% and 2% respectively. Internet Explorer dropped 2% to 6% (93% 8+, same as last year). 1% Misc.

Mobile (phones and tablets) went up from 2% last year to 3% this year.

Milestones

The most significant CSS-Tricks milestone was doing the Kickstarter and then launching v10 of the site including The Lodge.

This year I also started doing Chronicle posts which give me a place to talk about all kinds of different stuff that doesn’t really deserve entire blog posts but are still all good things to mention on this site.

There is now an always-open merchandise store on CSS-Tricks thanks to the amazing Sara Cope – the closest thing I have to an employee around here.

The very first ShopTalk episode was January 9th, 2012, so that has been a huge thing for this year. We plan to keep that going strong all next year.

Perhaps my biggest milestone this year was launching CodePen. Our first commit to that project was also in January, so it was also a child of 2012.

Goal Review

Actually design more things, become better designer

I feel good about this one. I don’t think my design skill is where I want it to be (I feel like the best place to be is when you can design things that match your own level of taste) but it’s gotten much better. Thanks in no small part to being the sole designer on CodePen and the big redesign of this site.

Finish Almanac

Almost… still some outliers I need to finish.

Release a book or have serious progress on one

Not even close. Didn’t even start one really. Some good ideas came and went. Another book is in my future I’d bet, but I’d be surprised if that happened in 2013.

Produce at least one new round of CSS-Tricks merchandise

Done.

Release one web app side project

Nailed it.

Continue same moderate pace of blogging and shooting screencasts while also posting new things to the gallery and snippets.

Little light on snippets but otherwise good here too.

New Goals

• Grow traffic on this site. I’m a bit bummed by the stagnation of traffic. I had some numbers wrong, in looking again there was 38% growth which ain’t bad. But still: I hope to grow it by producing more and better content in every area of the site.
• Average one free screencast every two weeks.
• Release at least one new complete series to The Lodge. Hopefully in the first third of the year.
• Keep growing and expanding CodePen. We have a huge internal list of things we want to do and I’d like to see everything on that list (as of now) done.
• Keep on keeping on at ShopTalk releasing a new show every week.
• Be a better web community member all around, participating in more discussions on this site and elsewhere, and bringing more community to CodePen

These feel like very reasonable goals especially considering this will be the first complete year where all my time is my own. Plus, I’ve purposefully kept my speaking schedule light, only doing a few ones that look amazing and a few others that are always my favorite.

So again, THANK YOU for being a reader of CSS-Tricks and here’s to a fantastic 2013 for all of us!