Photo by yewenyi.
2008 was a great year for CSS Newbie. And in the same nostalgic spirit of CSS-Tricks, Smashing Magazine and (I’m sure) countless other web entities, I thought I’d take a minute or two to step back and reflect on what the year has brought for CSS Newbie.
Although I first purchased cssnewbie.com some time in the middle of 2007 and wrote my first “intro to CSS” article in November of last year, I didn’t officially launch the site until February 1, 2008. Thus, this article also serves as History of CSS Newbie – before 2008, there wasn’t such a website, and now there is. And thanks to you fantastic readers and commenters out there, it’s become a better and more rewarding website than I had imagined it could.
Growth
On January 1, 2008, CSS Newbie had exactly zero visitors – it seems even I was too busy recovering from my celebrating to stop by! Luckily, that trend hasn’t continued. I published my first “official” article on the site (talking about how to create book-style article introductions) on February 1st. That day I saw a huge jump in traffic… 11 visits!
By the end of the week, that one article had gained me a couple hundred visitors, and a milestone against which to work. Although the number was small, that first week’s worth of traffic meant a great deal to me. It proved, if nothing else, that maybe I wasn’t entirely crazy to think that I could put together a website talking about CSS. Maybe, just maybe, a few people would find what I had to say interesting.
That first successful article gave me the drive to write a second, and so forth until here we are at the end of 2008 and the CSS Newbie table of contents is chock full of interesting tidbits, so much so that I often find myself looking through the archive to remember how to do things I’ve forgotten! That’s one benefit of writing for CSS Newbie that I never expected.
Statistics
I’m a bit of a statistics nerd. As such, here are some interesting stats that help visualize the year’s progression.
- I published 99 articles, or an average of a little more than eight per month.
- You-all have left 670 comments(!). That’s an average of 56 per month, or roughly seven comments per article. And I appreciate it!
- Alexa gives CSS Newbie a 3-month average traffic rank of 124,122… and a 1-week average of 58,318. Growth is in the cards!
- 152,907 unique visitors have stopped by this year, generating 293,329 page views.
- 50% of my traffic came from other sites. Thanks to all of you who linked here!
- 38% of visitors get here through search engines.
The five most responded-to articles of the year were:
- The CSS-Only Accordion Effect
- A Semantic List-Based CSS Calendar
- Equal Height Columns with jQuery
- Book-Style Chapter Introductions Using Pure CSS
- Intelligent Navigation Bars with JavaScript and CSS
And here are the five most popular articles of the year in terms of traffic:
- The CSS-Only Accordion Effect
- Six Ways to Style Blockquotes
- Horizontal CSS Dropdown Menus
- Intelligent Navigation Bars with JavaScript and CSS
- Show/Hide Content with CSS and JavaScript
Progression
And where will CSS Newbie go from here? Well, I certainly hope to increase both overall usefulness and visitor levels between the end of this year and the end of 2009. But how that happens could have a lot to do with you, the reader.
To that end, I’ve started a new survey to find out what you’d like to see happen with CSS Newbie over the course of the next year. I’ve made a few suggestions for ideas that I’ve thrown around, but if you can think of anything that I should be doing that I haven’t considered, please let me know about it in the comments.
The survey:
[poll id=”3″]
The survey is also available in the footer of every page on the site. Please take a second to let me know what you’d like to see from the site over the next year – I’ll take your suggestions into very serious consideration.
Thanks
Thank you, the reader, for making CSS Newbie what it is today, and for helping me make it what it will become in 2009. Thanks to my guest authors for the year: Scott Philips, Chris Coyier, and Aaron Webb. Thanks to Jeremy Harrington for designing the new CSS Newbie that launched at the beginning of this month. Thanks to my coworkers and friends for helping me talk through my article ideas and suggesting fantastic articles of their own. And thanks to the Twitter crowd for expanding my online and inlife communities in ways I never imagined.
Here’s to a fantastic 2008, and an even better 2009!