The Site in Review

Hi all! Welcome and cheers to a brand new decade! Wow! 2010 went by in a blink of an eye. I thought it would be nice to look back and reflect on what happened in 2010. While I would like to think that the idea of an end of the year article was all mine, I took cues from other established blogs online. Thanks PetaPixel! So what’s this all about? It’s all about site stats. So let’s start shall we?

Making the switch:

Some of you might not be aware of it but I actually started with a static site which was hosted through SmugMug. While the site was effective in proofing and selling our work, I felt that it didn’t promote the brand enough. I felt I wasn’t getting the exposure I’ve been looking for in a website. In March of 2010, I made the switch from a gallery based site to a blog based site.

It’s in the Blog:

To get things started with the switch, I purchased a WordPress based template from ProPhoto Blogs. Not having enough experience in web design, I used the power and ease of the WordPress platform along with the cool features of ProPhoto Blogs to help create the look of the new site. Ever since then, ProPhoto has been a great partner of the success of the site.

In the Darkroom:

While the blog has been primarily devoted to sessions and assignments, I felt the site needed an active area where folks can interact on a daily basis. Enter the Darkroom. The goal of this part of the site was to enhance and inspire. While the main blog’s traffic has been slowly increasing, traffic in the Darkroom has been incredible to say the least. Over the last 9 months, 128 posts were published garnering 372 comments. Traffic-wise, we received 5,654 page views from 3,116 unique visitors from 70 countries with the US, Canada, UK, Philippines, and Poland rounding off the Top 5.

Twitter:

We now have 509 followers on Twitter and we’re listed on 30 Twitter lists. We’ve published 2,436 tweets since we started. Twitter has definitely been a great tool in expanding our site’s visibility.

Facebook:

Our following on this popular social network has increased to 357 Likes (up from 75 fans). Our monthly active users has increased by 384% since this time last year. Monthly interactions has seen a great increase as well with over 81, 673 post views and 452 post feedbacks just in the last month.

What lies ahead:

Well, there’s already a lot of things happening and it’s just the start of the year. I just launched a new branch of the site for the 365 Project who’s main goal is to promote the idea of taking a photo each day for an entire year. We officially launched the site on December 31^st as we had contributing members from the Philippines and other parts of Asia. In this time, the site has received 4,616 page views from 3,427 unique visitors from 56 countries. Needless to say, the stats are staggering! The 365 Project has received 82% of the hits in 4 days  what the Darkroom had achieved in the past 9 months! The 365 Project currently has 33 contributors from 4 different continents. When I started the idea of the 365, I thought I would be lucky to get 10 people to join me. It’s a great group of people and I hope you can stop by every now and then and check out our work.

Darkroom will still continue to promote and inspire you and others through the inspirational posts and articles. Through the great input we’ve received from our subscribers, we’ve decided to add a forum feature on the site. Think of this place as another way to network and meet other photographers and enthusiasts.

So thank you for making 2010 an amazing year! Thank you for everything so far. I think we made the right decision to integrate our work into a blog-based website. It’s been a great year for the site and here’s looking forward to a great 2011!