ali felski

The response I’ve gotten to my blog in the last couple of months has been so exciting. I really just created it so that I could learn and get better at CSS and HTML after becoming slightly bored of the flash and print worlds. I never dreamed that it would have gotten about 80,000 visits, and almost a quarter million page views from people in over 160 countries (less than 1/3 being from the US). So for this post, I just wanted to take the time to show you what to expect if your site starts gaining popularity, and talk about a couple of things I wish I would have known before starting on this journey.

The Flood

It seems that when you get on one site, others tend to follow. I was excited when my google analytics told me that I’d been added on a couple of small sites like cssbased.com, and free-css.com. These three combined for more than 100 visits per day, which seemed huge for me. I wasn’t used to getting 100 visits in a year let alone in a single day! A couple of days later though, my expectations were blown out of the water when my site was posted on webcreme.com. With almost 2,000 visits that day alone, more people had seen my website than had graduated with me from college. At the end of September, only 10 days after launching, my site had been listed on at least a dozen galleries, and had served almost 25,000 page views. Crazy!

The month of October provided no rest for the weary web server. In fact, during this month, I had over 30,000 visits and almost 100,000 page views. If only I’d had the foresight to run ads! ;) Some of the biggest spikes occurred when my site was posted onto galleries such as cssmania.com (Oct. 13 had 2,340 visits), and was featured in an article on Smashing Magazine (Oct. 24 had 3,199 visits). Finally, toward the end of the month I was listed on bestwebgallery.com which has ended up becoming the site’s sugar daddy, sending the site 13,325 visits and 46,637 page views.

Of course the waters have calmed down a bit in the last couple of months. These days, I average about 1,700 page views and 500 visits a day. How that can be the “calm” period just blows my mind.

Some of you might be wondering what browsers people are using coming from these sites. Here are the raw numbers: Firefox 65%, IE7 10.8%, IE6 4.2%, Safari 12.68%, Chrome 3.65%, Opera 2.83% (I am sure most of you, like me, are overjoyed to notice the low IE6 number).

The Frosting

Over the last 4 months I have gotten more emails and job offers than I could shake a stick at and it’s been wonderful and humbling. Don’t worry Sunlight, I’m not going anywhere! Through it all, I’ve really valued:

• Connecting with people, whether they are old friends I have lost touch with or new and interesting people from around the world. About a month ago I got the opportunity to meet with a couple from Berlin while they were in town, and had a great time sitting and talking with them over coffee.
• It’s been flattering and wonderful knowing that I’ve inspired people to strive to improve design on the web. If I’ve influenced the web, even just a little, it would be worth all the time and effort I’ve put toward it.

The Liver and Onions (and advice I wish I’d had)

Of course not everything can be puppies and long cycling rides through the hills. Here are some of the things I wish I’d considered a while ago:

• Decide upfront how much time you have to dedicate to freelance work, what kind of work you’ll accept and keep everything organized. I feel like I’ve missed interesting opportunities by not responding quickly to jobs that I wasn’t sure I’d have time for, or have offended people for jobs that weren’t as interesting because I wasn’t sure how to reply back.
• Respond to emails directly after you read them or decide not to respond to all of them. Up front I decided that I would email everyone who emailed me which has resulted in much more time spent in front of my computer (my eyes are crying). Most emails I receive don’t require a long response, and if I’d just taken the time to respond to them immediately they wouldn’t have gotten pushed off for another day, and would have left me much more time down the road. I’m sorry if I haven’t written you back. While my office is closed this week I am going to catch up, I promise :)
• Don’t get too wrapped up in what is happening with your website. It is easy to spend hours responding to emails or reading Bloglines but you don’t become a great designer by watching CSS galleries all day. You just learn how to make websites that look like everyone else’s. Inspiration is everywhere, so go out and find it ;)