If you haven’t been keeping up with my Wiii Fit project, read the previous project posts.

Analytics for 2008

Here’s my take on why the analytics look like they do.

April – June

Since the game hasn’t been released, there wasn’t much competition for the search results. I was one of a few other sites tracking Wii Fit news so I got a decent amount of traffic.

The spike that happened in mid June was the week the game was released so a mass number of people started searching for it and gave me a nice spike in traffic.

June – October

More and more competition grew for the search results so my site was stagnant because it didn’t have the link juice to rank high enough.

October – December

Christmas was coming and Wii Fit just happened to be one of the hottest items for the 2008 season. So people’s searching went up and I got a nice curve in traffic.

Google Adsense for 2008

Almost 30,000 impressions yielding a bit over $100 bucks.

Here’s a chart of how the earnings looked.

Amazon?

When building the site I did a “Why Not” move and used an Amazon Associates widget to make a Purchase Wii Fit page. It took all of 3 minutes to complete with the super easy to use widget maker.

Although I didn’t expect it to make anything because my understanding is that Amazon referrals don’t convert well, I didn’t have much to lose other than about 5 minutes of my time.

Here’s how it performed.

Not too shabby, especially for practically zero work.

Things to Consider

Here’s a few tips I learned from doing my site that might help you if you’re doing something similar.

Links are Crucial

I believe that the number one thing that didn’t make this project an overwhelming success was the lack of links to the site. I did my best to get optimize all the SEO stuff I could, but I never had enough links to my site to boost it to great traffic levels.

Don’t underestimate the value of Google Images.

A majority of  my visitors game to the site via Google Images. I developed a nice picture page and it paid off.

Build questions into your SEO strategy.

Yahoo Answers tends to get picked on for producing lots of crap content. Call it a signal/noise problem if you will. But what makes there service such an awesome product for Yahoo is that they are now getting SEO results for questions being asked. People like to type questions into their Google searches, use it to your advantage.

Think about how people will search for your site. Develop your SEO strategy to include answers to your user’s questions.

At Christmas-time, get people to Amazon anyway you can.

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard this advice from Darren Rowse, and he’s 100% correct. If you can get people directed to Amazon via your associate link there’s a good chance you’ll profit. Those Amazon profits I showed you weren’t all from Wii Fit sales. There were a few odds and ends in there that people just happened to finish their Christmas shopping on Amazon after being directed to the site through mine.

Produce some killer, unique content.

Another potential fatal blow to the site’s success was that I didn’t take the time to produce some nice articles that would have been completely unique to my site. By simple becoming an aggregate of content that showed up in my inbox form Google Alerts, I was merely diluting the search results. Instead of there being only one piece of content somewhere I produced a second similar one that inflated the density of the search terms.

Thanks for taking the time to follow the project. All in all it was a decent project. It paid for my hosting, which was my only real stipulation for considering the site a success. It also got me my first Adsense check! I will probably won’t touch the site again until October to get a few updates in before the Christmas season. After the Christmas season I will probably see if it’s worth putting the site up on auction and getting a few more bucks for it.

I hope the project has been as good of a learning experience for you as it has been for me. If all goes well, I plan to have get another project similar to this one, but bigger, starting in July.  Stay tuned.

“I think all great innovations are built on rejections.”

Louise Nevelson

Over the past two weeks I’ve spent several hours of preparing, coding, testing and documenting a Wordpress theme that I submitted to the web templates marketplace Theme Forest. I spent most of last night doing all the prep work for submitting the theme and its required documentation. Around 2am I finally got the theme submitted. And by the time I got back from lunch the same day, it was rejected.

After reading the e-mail I had a few different emotions running through. I was disappointed, naturally. I felt like my past few weeks of work were a complete waste and I should have just gone to sleep earlier and saved myself the trouble.

I was a bit confused by the rejection. I examined other Wordpress themes for sale before I even began working on mine to see the quality of themes that were approved. While I knew my theme wasn’t earth shattering by any means, I felt that it added a few nice things that the others were lacking.  Some of the approved themes had spelling errors and a few looked like something I could reproduce in under 5 hours. So I began working with confidence that my theme would at least get approved, it might not be an all-time best seller, but approval was my goal.

As the initial negative feelings started to subside I recalled of a portion of a book I’m currently reading. In Stephen King’s On Writing he recalls submitting his fiction stories to various publications as he was growing up. An overwhelming majority of his earlier submission were returned with rejection slips attached. He would take each slip and punch it through a nail that hung over his bed. The stack of slips got so large that he eventually had to move them to a bigger nail to hold them all. Of course now he is know as one of the most successful fiction writers ever.

Although it seems easy to just give up after the rejection and forgo trying to submit anything again, I’ve learned it’s best to reflect on what I learned from the process. Cup half full kind of thinking.

• I have my first slip to go on the nail.
• I learned that the polish of a theme takes FOREVER. I had about 99% of the theme finished within the first weekend of work. That remaining 1% took about ten times longer than the 99%.
• I learning some tricks for getting IE6 to work. This is what a majority of my hold-up was. Now I can hopefully churn through IE6 issues much quicker in the future.
• I learned how to code a custom options panel in Wordpress. This is the best thing I learned from submitting a theme that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise. By submitting the theme I had to try to make this theme easy for people who don’t know how to hack their php to get advanced features. So I took the time to learn this technique and I must say it’s a powerful tool to use. Although some of his code needs correcting, this tutorial is a great place to learn how to make your own.
• I now have a very polished theme framework from which to code future themes. I designed the theme with multiple css files. One controls the entire layout and others control the colors. I can now use that polished layout css and can just include a different color css file to get drastic results in the blog’s presentation.

Although the experience wasn’t exactly what I had hoped for, I do plan on submitting more themes and eventually getting an accepted e-mail. I appreciate the opportunity Theme Forest provides and especially Kailoon for taking the time to review the theme, even if it wasn’t up to aesthetic standards.

If you would like to check out my Circularize’d Wordpress theme and offer suggestions in the comments on what I could do improve to get it past the approval process it would be greatly appreciated. This page lists all of the theme’s features.

This is a follow up to last week’s 39 Grunge Resources Post.

Von Dutch

Bridge 55

The Letter

Team Green Online

Tattered Fly

Soma Communities

Subdued

Shaker Designs

Scouting For Girls

Satsu

Rumours About Angels

Red 9ine

Pain Is Good

Olly Hite

nYq Design

Moustache Me

Mind Twitch

Loworks Store

Lataka

Lake Crackenback

KC Revolution

Juxt Interactive

Grungy Bit

Got Aqua

Generation Church

Elan Snowboards

Dirty Pretty Things Band

Design Sponge

Design B Studios

Dark Light Art

Web Designer

CSS Rockstars

CSS Addict

Cafe Rouge

Burn the Fields

Biola

Ali Tabatabaei

AJ Miles

Adventure Trekking

Have a good day.

DESIGNING GRUNGE

Tutorials about designing the grunge look

• Make it Worn 1 – Desiging a Website with a Worn Look
• Discover the Art of Grunge – Elliot Jay Stocks shows how to Design a Grunge styled website
• Grunge Type Photoshop Example
• 15 Great Tutorials on Grunge Design Style
• How to Create a Grunge Webdesign in Photoshop
• 50 Dirty, Filthy Grunge Photoshop Effects
• 40 Beautiful Grunge Photoshop Tutorials
• Creating a Retro Grunge Poster
• Create a Grungy Header Graphic
• Create a Grungy Web Design and Paper Texture

GRUNGE RESOURCE COLLECTION

Sites focused on grunge design or good posts that deliberate on grunge design and give examples

• Grunge Style in Modern Web Design – Smashing Magazine gives a full writeup on grunge design with website examples, grunge fonts, icon sets, and textures.
• Ultimate Resources for Grunge Design a Massive Collection – Design Shard gives a huge list of grunge design with tutorials, brushes, photography, textures, fonts and Wordpress themes. Excellent list.
• Grunge Style Blog
• GrungyBit
• The Secrets of Grunge Design – An absolutely fantastic post explaining grunge design in detail. It shows the elements, colors and websites of grunge design.

FONTS

Good typography for grunge designs

• 5 Free Grunge Fonts
• Bleeding Cowboys Grunge Font
• Grunge Serifia
• XBAND Rough
• 63 Must Have Grunge Fonts
• 30 New (Free) Grunge Fonts

BRUSHES

Grunged out Photoshop brushes

• Grunge Ink Splatter Brushes
• Splatter, Spray and Watercolor Brushes
• 15 Scratch Splat Grunge Brushes
• Grungy Textures Photoshop Brushes
• 200+ Free Grunge Photoshop Brushes
• 12 Grunge Brushes
• Grunge Corners and Edges Photoshop Brush Pack
• 33 Subtle Grunge Textures and Effects
• Journal Brushes – Not exactly grunge but they have a nice distressed look that could be useful in grunge design.

TEXTURES

Grunge textures such as rust, dirt or paper

• 50 Grunge Icon Textures
• Grunge Paper Textures
• 5 High-Resolution Rust Textures

ICONS

Mostly social media icons given that trendy worn effect

• Collection:Grunge Icons
• Free Grunge Style Social Bookmarks
• Feeds Grunge Icons

WORDPRESS THEMES

Collection of grunge Wordpress themes

• 13 Best Grunge Wordpress Themes
• 15 Must Have Grunge Blog Themes
• 23 of the Best Grunge-Style Wordpress Themes

The Dilemma

Throughout my daily browsing habits I tag websites or posts if they either talk about or exemplify a certain design style. Using grunge web design as an example, if a post is about grunge or if the website itself is designed in grunge, then I tag it with ‘grunge’. I’ve been doing that for a few months and with an increasingly number of designs trying to go grunge I thought that it would make a good post to simply look through my delicious tags for grunge and smack them into a post.

So I took the time and got all the links into a post and organized them into meaningful groups. After doing so I couldn’t help but feel wrong about it. Something about not actually producing any of the content listed in the post bothered me. It bothered me because I felt like I was stealing others work, because I merely grouped a broad topic together, because others spent their time creating something and if my post goes viral or something similar, I’m benefiting from their work.

The Analysis

My sentiments about the blogosphere and what good blogging should be are becoming more and more aligned with practically everything Merlin Mann says. One thing in particular that he says that challenges me is that you should write every post with a person in mind. Imagine that that post is being written to them.

With that in mind, I expounded and analyzed my 39 Grunge Resources post.

Who is the post for?

I would say it’s mainly for me. Although I could find all these resources in my delicious tags, the post goes a bit further with the organization and makes it very easy to find what I want.  The post is also for the community. Grunge is getting very popular and this post can help people trying to gather resources on how to accomplish that design style.

Why am I writing the post?

Basically for links. The post falls right inline with what the definition of what linkbait is.

What do I plan to do with the post?

After it launches, I plan to submit it to a few of the social media sites that focus on design.

What do I want from  the post?

Ideally I’d like to make the front page of a few social media sites and get a few hundred hits. I want people to bookmark it and come back to it months later when they are getting around to designing something in grunge.

The Crux

When getting my Computer Science degree and starting off with CS101 I learned that the defining point between data or information is this: organization.

Although I haven’t produced any real content for the post, it’s the organization of the post that makes it viable.

That organization is also very vital to making the post’s content usable to others, which also helps validate some of my concerns.

The Conclusion

Although I think that people who publish aggregation posts aren’t wrong for doing it, for me, it just doesn’t feel right. I like knowing that when you read my blog you are getting to know me better through my writing. That you are reading my ideas and hearing my opinions. I can’t get that same feeling through the regurgitation of others content.

Apart from the grunge design posts mentioned, I don’t think I will be doing anymore pure aggregation style posts. That being said, I do hope you enjoy them and get some use from them. One is out now and the other should be less than a week away.

What’s your opinion on aggregation posts?

Let me give you a scenario that I’ve been seeing lately.

Some person, either a friend or coworker or family member, is bragging to you about some new computer they just purchased. They give you a run down on all the specs. Their face brightens as they talk about getting the best of the best. Quad-cores, the latest video cards, the greatest hard drive storage.

So you proceed to ask them what their plans are for this monster machine.

Their response, “Browsing and working on Word docs”.

Who’s fault is it for the More Power Syndrome?

I have written about the lessening need to max out computer hardware. Even though I’m convinced that most computer hardware isn’t the real bottleneck in performance, many people still are.

Is it the consumer’s fault?

Perhaps these people buying suped up computers hoping to watch their YouTube videos faster are getting what they deserve. They should pay more for not doing research about computers and realize that they would profit more from upgrading from 1.5 mbps DSL to 6.0 mbps. Whenever it comes time for me to make some important purchasing decision I make sure I’m fully educated, often to the point that I know more about the product than the person selling it to me.

Is it the consumer’s fault for poor research?

Is it the marketer’s fault?

Maybe the reason so many people over buy their computers is because all the marketing suggests that it will improve their performance. I can’t remember that last time I saw an ad that acted like I didn’t need the latest and greatest. Can you?

Is it the marketer’s fault for overstating performance benefits?

Is it the manufacturer’s fault?

Computers, PCs especially,  are cheap. Dirt cheap. With weekly deals being given at almost all computer retailers, it’s not hard to find a good bargain on a good piece of hardware. You can pay an extra $100 to $150 to get a base model maxed out, depending on what deals are going. Maybe most of these overboard purchases are because it’s not that expensive to upgrade to something beefier.

Is it the manufacturer’s fault for making the upsell so cheap?

Is it our fault?

Perhaps the reason that above scenario takes place is because people like you and me aren’t educating them on what specs are worth paying attention to and what upgrades would be more beneficial. I try to let it be known amongst my family that they can contact me if they have a computer question and I always try to give sound advice to them. Even with that I feel like it isn’t enough.

I had a family member get a new MacBook Pro this week, and the only applications he’ll probably use are Word and Keynote.

The scenario at the beginning was a conversation I had yesterday with a co-worker.

Is it our fault for not better educating others?

So, who’s to blame?

What bothers me most about this isn’t the fact that the domain is already taken, but that the idea isn’t being put to use.

For example:

I was just thinking about how list-style posts are popular and while creating them is simple, there is actually a craft to making great list-style posts. So I thought it would be interesting to have a blog devoted to list-style posts. Either crafting all my own lists or being an aggregate of others good list posts. The lists could be informative or just humorous, similar to Merlin Mann’s 5ives.

Anyways, the first domain name that came to mind was listslistslists.com.  Immediately an image of a logo for the site pops into my head. It looks something like this:

Next I think about how the site would ooze minimalistic design. Nothing but greyscale with slight pops of color to emphasis certain things like the RSS button. Just a very clean site with nothing but yummy lists to explore.

Mind you all that has happened above took less that 5 seconds to process. So I type in listslistslists.com and to my chagrin it’s just an ugly old parked page.

So that’s my complaint about parked pages. Interesting content goes squandered in hopes of making a quick buck on a domain flip.

Do you have any similar situations where you’re upset that a domain isn’t being put to good use or at least not the way you envisioned it?

I feel like I’m missing one of them, if I find it I’ll be sure to add it.

It kinda struck me just now, although I’ve always known deep down, that I’m not a very balanced person.

I’m a to the hilt type of person. When I do something, I becoming fully involved in it.  I learn everything I can about it. It consumes most of my time and energy.

For instance, my mother still tells me stories of how when I was a child I had a time when I would wake up on Saturday mornings and spend the entire day in my room playing with K’nex. I didn’t care about anything else, except building with my construction toys.

And I’ve had a few people ask when I was going to write more posts for this blog, and my answer has been that I am currently working on another blog project that I was tired of talking about and decided to start. My energy has been completely involved with this new project from brainstorming and general plans for how the blog will go, to custom designing the theme and writing around 15 posts to start the blog off with.

So that epiphany got me thinking about which is better to be.

Extreme Person

An extreme person is typically, from my experiences, driven by great passion for whatever it is he is doing, but there is also that ‘burn out’ that tends to happen. I don’t know if ‘burn out’ is the best term, usually I just become more passionate for something else, its not as if I loath the project I previously had.

That extreme personality though causes everything else to suffer. I become so consumed with one project, all the others go neglected.

Balanced Person

On the other hand, the balanced person’s foibles are simply inverse to the extreme person’s fortes. A balanced person isn’t driven with passion. Their day, week, whatever is a routine. They spend 1 hour a day doing x and 2 hours doing y. They don’t have those nights where they stay up so late working on a project they love that their mind becomes mush and they can’t string together coherent thoughts due to fatigue.

A balanced person also can adhere so much to their routine that most of their projects are simply maintained and no worthwhile progress is had on any of them.

Final Thoughts

My writing skills have probably gone down in the past month of nothingness, but I can also smack out a decent Wordpress theme in no time after completing 3 in that same time period.

I can definitely see how becoming a more balanced person can help me. One thing I’d like to do but haven’t gotten very far on is to take an hour or two each week and go through some Photoshop tutorial to sharpen those skills. But I guess if I truly became passionate about learning Photoshop then I can make up those lost hours by powering through Photoshop books and tutorials in a passion-driven month.

Although, I better get some balancing skills by the time I start to become a real freelancer juggling multiple clients at once.

What’s your opinion? Are you a more balanced or extreme person? Any advice on why I should become more balanced or remain as I am?

I don’t know if I would call it that much of an improved design as much as I would call it an improved layout. I did some things very differently than what traditional blogs do. The homepage’s layout is nothing like the subpages. I plan to go through my design process the next few weeks explaining my rational behind why I made certain decisions and how I think other’s could benefit from them.

Also I will be redoing the aethetics of the blog with a series of project style posts. I will explain and give resources about a certain design style, then at end of the series release a new design based off the design style featured.

Thanks for checking out the new design. Let me know what you think.