Total Followers 132,503
Hello everybody! Finally that day has come! Which day you may ask?
Well…where should I start? – today 1WD is celebrating 2 years anniversary and fourth (4th) version of design.
We were working really hard all summer, and if one year ago I was working all alone, now I am honored to have a beautiful team together with me including several full time writers Rean, Sheena, Jane, Michael,Charina with our main chief editor Saad Bassi and social media ninja Ligita Kluga.
Huh, also what I need to add, our actual 2 years anniversary was on August 30, but we didn’t announce it because our new design wasn’t finished. Now it’s here and we are finally ready to move on!
I was planning this new design for almost half a year, I changed its look a lot of times and even thought of hiring a web designer – because as a designer myself I was never satisfied with final outcome.
Finally I thought it would be really a shame for a designer, to get his own page designed by someone else and put everything aside and seriously got to work. The site you are seeing right now is final outcome, and this is how 1WD site should look from the very beginning 2 years ago! I really hope you love it the same way as I do and you are very much welcomed to reveal your first impressions in our comment section, which is much prettier now too by the way!
Before we announce our huge giveaway to celebrate this big event and launch, I think now is the best time to look back again and show off all achievements, show what really made 1WD grow so much and how do we intent to keep it growing even further! Last year we actually did the same process, and today we will compare both years to make this even more interesting. Are you excited and cannot wait for the results? Let’s start!
Personally I think the main turning point was the moment, when 1WD got a great team – Saad Bassi, who is our main editor and Ligita Kluga, who does all the hard work into backlink building and social promoting. I just went more in background and finally got more time to work on new ideas, try new social media promotion ways, went deeper in marketing research and of course, worked on new redesign a lot.
Besides our team, we also got huge team of regular and not so regular guest writers, who altogether allowed us to go from 2–3 articles per week to 12 articles per week! We are still working on increasing both quality and quantity, but since our readership is increasing – I consider that article count increase is appreciated by people and we are doing the right thing.d
As you can see from our Archive section from Year 2010 article count started to increase and it happened because of other changes – I finally got an office – 1WD headquarters and good workplace increased work efficiency greatly. Before that for almost 1.5 years I was working from home, it was not an easy task.
I am sure you cannot wait to see some public stats to measure 1WD growth, enough words..let’s see real numbers.
I must say once site is established, all you have to do is to keep providing constant quality and content – 1WD kept very similar mode all the time and proved to be a regular source where to look for web design related articles and readership continued to grow. Of course, article count also increased traffic from Google, more articles – more chances to be noticed.
To put last year stats more in perspective, check out this graph, where I compare this and previous year:
Interesting to analyze now, while unique visits increased – people also tend to spend less time on page and bounce rate is actually bigger, maybe that’s because of massive social media promotion, where people are used to process huge amounts of information in short time.
What’s your opinion here? Do you have suggestions for us?
Would love to hear your feedback if possible, with such big readership we really feel responsible for delivering only the best information to you!
If there is such question, I think actually the main reason was article count increase, with bigger team we are able to do a lot more than before, where one person just physically isn’t able to write that much articles, do marketing, social media, promotion even working 24/7. I must say if you are really serious about your business, hire people to help you out once you get such chance – they will help you to grow site to the phase you never imagined, site could reach!
Google traffic increased like 7 times, thanks to the list posts 1WD continue to have big success through Social Media sites like – StumbleUpon, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Facebook. Don’t underestimate the power of social networks, it’s really worth spending time to build trusted networks and readership with it.
I am investing a lot of site income in our growth, I am keeping myself just like 1/4 and 3/4 goes into development, payments, hosting expenses because I know 1WD can grow a lot bigger, I really want it to become number 1 source for each web designer. If you have a passion – you can achieve the same as I did here, just believe yourself and don’t leave your dreams too fast, give them actual chance.
If you want to go to past and see how and why 1WD began its success, read last year’s report post – 1st Year Of Blogging: Success And Achievements.
At first I wanted to mix giveaway, 1WD redesign process and stats in the one post, but after some thinking I decided that redesign process description need to have separate post so I would be able to explain you whole thinking behind it and show a lot of detail and power in our new design. Keep updated, new article will be out in few days!
Well , now we are getting to the best part for you – our huge giveaway and great prizes – everybody loves free stuff right? Christmas came early this time!
We have contacted and collaborated with 15 different companies, which were kind enough to offer really great prizes! Okay, but how can you get them? Actually I will pick winners based on 2 different aspects ( the first one is the most powerful):
As you can see number 1 option is for more loyal readers, who have opinion about what’s happening here and actually wants to help us improve.
Well and number 2 option is for all of us, who just are quickly browsing through and just wants to get nice Christmas gift for this special giveaway occasion!
And now – get you keyboards hot and start commenting and checking out our actual giveaway prizes right now:
CodeMyConcept is the best PSD to HTML service on the planet. Their company not just don’t specialize in providing superb PSD to HTML and CMS implementations, every piece of code we write is done with love and passion, and they feel that their job is not only to provide a service to web designers and freelancers, they build relationships and they really love it!
Company’s expertise and services:
When you work with CodeMyConcept you are definitely working with your best friends and they even agreed to join to our huge giveaway with some great prizes!
2 lucky winners will get $250 giftcards and 1 winner will get $500 worth giftcard to be used in CodeMyConcept services, pretty cool right?
Slideshow box is an easy to use application that enables you to create amazing Flash and HTML (JavaScript) photo slideshow galleries.
SlideshowBox comprises 24 high-quality slideshow templates that allow you to create custom photo slideshows without the pains of coding. Many new templates will be added in the near future, including more pure JavaScript slideshows.
UPrinting is a professional online printing company that provides commercial and small business print services. Their online printing services help you print everything – business cards, fashionable clothing hang tags, attractive door hangers, customizable folded cards, appealing greeting cards, and promotional calendars.
Die cutting options available (more about printing options you will know after winning on this contest):
Free UPS Shipping, Limited to US Residents only, must be 18 and above to enter.
Azigos is a shop that provide high quality Photoshop Brushes. With our unique royalty free brushes, we help you to enhance your personal and commercial creations. You can purchase each brushes set individually or Join the Premium Members Program and get them all with unlimited download.
Sticker Mule prints custom stickers starting at $69 for 100. Send them your artwork and they do the rest. They aspire to be every artist and designer’s favorite sticker printing service.
Magic Members is a premium WordPress Membership Plugin that turn your WordPress blog into a powerful, fully automated membership site.
You may expect to pay $2,000 – $3,000 for such an easy to use, full-featured membership application that does not require you to switch to a different system. Magic Members is a fully integrated WordPress membership and subscription plug-in that quickly takes your blog from an ordinary blog to a powerful membership site.
Don’t miss a chance to aim for one of 3 single user licenses!
Eleven2 is a cutting edge web hosting companies with server locations in the US, Europe and Asia. With its speedy 24×7 live technical support, Eleven2 has grown to become a major player in the web hosting market. Starting at just $10 a month, you cannot go wrong with Eleven2.
StudioPress Themes take WordPress to places you never thought it would go. These Themes are a perfect solution for small businesses or individuals establishing their online presence and today we’ve got giveaway from them – 3 individual Theme/Support packages of winner’s choice each worth 79.95$.
KreativeThemes is a theme shop that sells beautiful, creative and high quality premium CMS themes.
They have kindly joined to this big giveaway and offered to our readers great prizes:
FlashMint is a leading Flash Templates provider known to produce innovative high quality flash templates, flash XML templates and Flash CMS templates as well as such amazing products as Facebook templates and PrestaShop templates.
On the holiday occasion Flashmint has 70% Christmas discount offer on all the templates from their collection. In addition to the discounts specially for 1stwebdesigner readers there will be also three amazing free flash greeting e-cards to be given away to every dear fan and customer of 1stWebDesigner and FlashMint. You may checkout the greeting cards from here: Free Flash Christmas e-cards for everyone!.
Iconshock is the largest stock icon provider around the web, with more than 800.000 stock icons in 250 icon sets. Feel free to check its tutorials blog: TutorialShock and its recently launched website with lot of wordpress themes and design sets: WordPressThemeShock.
And today they are giving 3 bundle licenses of your choice – how cool is that?
Pro Theme was established in 2007 by two experienced web developers, programmer Ben Gillbanks in London and designer Darren Hoyt in New York City.Emphasizing quality over quantity, Pro Theme has specialized in WordPress and enjoyed enduring popularity in the themes community.
In order to contribute in our giveaway they are offering 3 premium and beautiful themes of choice for 3 Winners!
Templatic, Officially launched on 10th of December 2009 is a place to get Out of the Box, Premium and Awesome WordPress Themes to fulfill your needs in different areas of Blogging and Webdesign. From a simple Blogging theme, to a complete e-commerce integrated WordPress Theme, they are releasing themes in diverse range so you can use WordPress as a CMS.
Gabfire Themes was founded in 2008 by Mehmet Özekinci a 30-year old independent web designer and web project consultant based in Estonia.
Gabfire Themes is a distinguished design and development studio providing a wide range of organized and well-presented creative WordPress themes. All Gabfire Themes features an easy-to-manage and powerful theme control panel & focus on providing an unparalleled user experience.
Ever wanted some high quality custom banner ads for your marketing needs? Well, ElegantBanners is for you then. They offer high quality web banner ads created to your specification, at a very affordable price, with lightning fast turnarounds! You can also check out their blog: ElegantBanners Blog, where they write about business, design, and entrepreneurship in general. Be sure to also follow them on Twitter.
I am looking forward to your kind comments – just to remind read the rules how to join this contest&giveaway at the top of this article.
This contest will be closed officially after a week on December 27, when I will announce all the winners!
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Dainis Graveris is 23 years old blogger and designer, founder of 1stWebDesigner, now more silently managing everything behind the scenes. He usually hangs out in Twitter tweeting design related links and chatting with people. If you have any questions or feedback that's the best place to start! Cheers!
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011 13:52
Have the winners been selected?
Friday, January 7th, 2011 15:58
I agree- It’d be nice if we had an update.
Thursday, January 6th, 2011 05:35
It’s January 6th now… Is the winners of the 1stWD 2 years Anniversary Giveaway Contest announced?
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011 09:25
I woul’d like to win a “5 Yearly Subscriptions from Azigos” thank you
Sunday, January 2nd, 2011 22:33
Late happy anniversary Dainis! Will be here next year to congrat you once more :)
If possible, i’d like to win the “KreativeThemes 5 Themes Giveaway of Winner’s Choice ( Worth 350$)”.
Good luck to all,
Bye
Friday, December 31st, 2010 16:16
Sorry to sound impatient, I wasn’t- the result time wasn’t posted in the original article, just wanted to clarify. Thanks for the response!
Friday, December 31st, 2010 09:39
Please be little more patient – just in few days, i think on January 1-2 results will be ready and winners contacted :)
Thursday, December 30th, 2010 19:33
Congratulations on your anniversary! I’m a big fan of this blog. One thing I’d recommend is less scrolling. Ideally, there would be just enough to read on the page and then I’d click to continue reading or click to see the next example within a big old list. Also, for the list posts, its’ helpful when there’s a sidebar letting you know what’s coming up, along with quick links to help readers skip ahead quicker. As a design guy, that’s just my 2 cents! The Internet breeds short attention spans, so the more you can get us actively engaged (and clicking), the better.
Wednesday, December 29th, 2010 15:12
When will the winners be selected?
Monday, December 27th, 2010 19:59
Happy Anniversary, truly enjoy reading your blog! Thank you for the opportunity to win all these lovely gifts! If I did win- would be a toss up between the banners and the die cut biz cards.
Here is my tweet and i just became a fb fan http://twitter.com/#!/DMWebsiteDesign/status/19481084223823872
Monday, December 27th, 2010 14:04
That’s a huge giveaway! Congrats to 1wd and wish them all the best on their journey….
As a Web Developer and WordPress Fan I would like to win any WP themes.
Here’s my tweet: http://twitter.com/smseleem/status/19154698724442112
Following @1stwebdesigner and Liked Design Blog (Username: Sumon Seleem)
Sunday, December 26th, 2010 23:38
http://twitter.com/#!/tinkerersvk/status/19167889441427456
Would love to win:
- Iconshocks Giveaway
- 5 Premium HTML Licenses Worth 500$ From SlideshowBox
Sunday, December 26th, 2010 23:13
I’ve been visiting this blog for about a year now.
What I don’t like:
1) The logo. It’s well recognized widely and perhaps is not a very important part for such blogs, but it is ugly, no hard feelings. I imagine a simple text line would look nicer and more inviting.
2) Annoying google ads. They let you earn some real cash, no doubt about that, but there are more reader-friendly alternatives for well established blogs. Write paid reviews! ;)
3) h2 or what ever tag you use in your post might stand out a little more, that would make it easier to look through the article in case you don’t have time to read it fully. Or in any other case… We all know how many readers actually read stuff.
4) Twitter stream in the sidebar is way to long. I’m sure 1WD has a lot of stuff to put in the sidebar, to make the whole layout more beneficial for both: readers and yourselves.
5) Hide the trackbacks and make the comment field easier to locate. Place it at the end of the article, perhaps. Not at the very bottom of the page.
6) The price of premium membership. Sorry but your resources are not as valuable as those from say wegraphics or vandelay or tutsplus, yet yours are priced higher.
What I do like:
1) New header. Awesome! :)
2) There are many interesting and helpful posts.
I guess my comment is turned out too harsh, but you asked for opinions and you’ve got mine. You’re obviously good at what you do, otherwise you wouldn’t be so popular. But why not make it even better or even… wait for it… perfect?
What would I like to win? CMC gift card.
As if you’d ever allow me to win after this comment.. Joking. :)
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Tomas Varil
Monday, December 20th, 2010 13:07
Hello, congratulation to your great anniversary. The statistics itself, shows that you made a great work!
I would like to see more articles about creating a wordpress custom themes. Or getting started guide, because I really would like to get more deep inside of wordpress themes engine :-) Best wishes to next 2 years!
I would like to win WordPress Membership Plugin, which I have never known about until today and I have been always looking for something like this :-)
Patt
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 05:38
Congratulations, 1WD! Cheers to more blog posts, exciting giveaways and loyal readers!
Wouldn’t mind having those crisp icons from Iconshocks Giveaway. Thanks!
http://twitter.com/#!/paddsolutions/status/17088893190930432
Clara
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 12:23
Congratulations guys.You are doing great job(promoting posts)
Well,1WD? One of th best ”Inspirational Posts” blog.
Quality or quantity?The answer is 50+ posts every month.SORRY.
By the way.your blog is verrry slow and it doesn’t work in some wide monitors.
Irina
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 13:01
Happy anniversary and congratulations!!
I’d also suggest removing the adds from the top of the posts, even for adds, they are quite annoying.
Also it would be great if you could add even more tutorials :D About web design but also about web development :)
I’ve also posted on twitter :)
I’d like to win some wp themes.
Keep up the good work!
vishnuprasad
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 08:28
congrats.. and thank you for giving these gifts.. i hope i will get any of these…
lazaac
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 04:52
congrats for the 2 year of anniversary… the traffic looks cool! i would like to win all the prizes..? may i? :p
Marc Davison
Monday, December 20th, 2010 17:47
Congrats.
I was taught to do cheers and wishes. This way you get some good, and some areas to improve upon.
Cheers:
For taking the time to design you site and not releasing the design til you were happy with it.
For increasing article amount, it’s a big help to the community at large.
Wishes:
Better ad placement. I hate the ads at the top before the article even starts, every single time I see that I nearly leave the site. I understand and appreciate that you need the ads to keep the site alive, but they seem to be all over the place with no thought.
I agree, footer needs some purpose, and the reaction area isn’t useful. Why, as a reader, would I want to scroll so far down the page just to see what you have in your footer?
I think the ‘Further Reading’ section could do with only links, or much smaller pictures. The images for it should not have the same visual weight as the images in the main article.
That being said: Congratulations and I hope two years after I launch I can be as successful.
I’d also like to win a code my concept gift card!
Nic
Monday, December 20th, 2010 23:59
Hope I win the CodeMyConcept gift card.
Steverobillard
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 02:00
First off let me say congrats on your success, and my hope that it continues throughout the next year. I like the clean nature of the new design.
While I like the redesign. I don’t like the implementation of the social media links in the left sidebar. While scrolling through the page they jump and are a little annoying. There are ways to avoid the scrolling/jumping.
I would most like to win the sticker mule credit.
PamS
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 03:05
Happy Anniversary! Your website has been a great inspiration and learning tool for me. Thank you, I appreciate. That’s also quite a list of giveaways you’re offering. I would be grateful for any one of them.
George Elias
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 13:30
I would like to start off by saying CONGRATS on the 2nd anniversary! Awesome job and keep up the hard work.
I must say that your site is one of my main resources and visit it daily for updates, great work on the increased articles. Some of the few comments I would have are:
- The Most Commented / Most Popular on Twitter: I would probably move that into the sidebar as it takes away from site and main page.
- For Further Reading: Same comment as others, would try to reduce it and maybe make into a one liner type thing.
- Some content: I would love to see a tutorial on how to convert PSD/Fireworks designs into HTML and CSS.
- Ads: I would try to find a better way to blend the ads in the site and not overwhelm the user with them.
Again, great job and wish you the best for the future.
I would love to win the Eleven2 webhosting.
Soohow
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 09:38
Happy Anniversary! Awesome giveaway prizes and I would like to win anything lol… If not, hereby Wishing you a Merry Christmas.
Dainis Graveris
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 20:52
Hello Arun,
such kind words always cheers me up, thank you – and I am glad I gave you some inspiration in your own site – checked it out..just keep content coming and then start communicating..that’s the key.
Hehe, I hope you’ll have some more other articles to refer to real soon, cheers to you back :)