Help Developer Thanks You

Help Developer was launched about a year ago, it went through many changes:

Stage 1,

Firstly, it was simply a directory where people could submit their tutorials on a whole host of areas, most of its traffic came from Stumbleupon and Digg until it got banned from Digg because it was a middle man site. This ruined Help Developer’s market on Digg where I think nowadays it could do very well. I have contacted Digg and asked them if they could change this and they quite rightly said no.

Stage 2,

Back in these days I wasn’t very good at design so my tutorials were pretty shocking (the bad shocking), so the next incarnation of Help Developer was to get more people on the site using it. I decided that I would have an adsense revenue sharing approach. Users would submit their whole tutorials and articles and receive a 50% ad revenue from them. I had no submissions.

Stage 3,

Things weren’t looking too good for Help Developer, so I decided to turn it into a blog, I submitted tutorials every now and then but they were just little things like creating buttons in The Gimp, nothing amazing still. Traffic started to come, it started to get indexed by Google and I started getting a few hundred people a day coming to the site, but I was hardly updating it so I wasn’t getting very many RSS readers.

Stage 4,

About a month and a half ago I started to look at some design sites like Smashing Magazine and Web Designer Wall, and as I started to find more Graphic Design blogs I started to enjoy what I was reading, I started getting ideas for posts on Help Developer and I started to find new ways to get people coming to my site, and now I am in a great position.

I think a great way to show this is with some stats, here are my visitor stats for the last 12 months:

As you can probably tell June has been pretty good. This has been because of you guys, Help Developer now has something that I have wanted for a very long time, an audience, an audience that keeps coming back day after day to read what I have to say. RSS subscribers have increased from about 15 before the facelift to over 200 and I am now opening my inbox in a morning to an overwhelming number of comments that I have to approve. The forum is starting to gradually get used and I am getting some great feedback on my own designing.

And if that doens’t top it off, I am now number 2 in the csstopsites list, just behind Crazy Leaf Design Blog.

So thank you all very much for coming to Help Developer and I hope that you carry on coming and enjoy using my site.