Growing An Online Presence: Strategies For More Page Views

You've decided to create a blog/website and have gotten fairly decent at publishing content on a regular basis. Congratulations! Like getting into a gym routine that lasts past January, this can actually prove to be a difficult habit to form and stick with - at least in my experience. So what now? In most cases, …

A more in-depth look at designers’ portfolios

Just six seconds. This is what is considered the time it takes to recruiters to look at curriculum vitae. Luckily, our hiring team spends far more time evaluating the candidates we get, not just because designers also have a portfolio to present, but also because we want to be sure to hire the best. This …

My plan to build an audience

Blogging isn't easy, and doing it regularly is hard. I know this because it's something I've struggled with for years (as evidenced by the very sparse archives on my personal site). Even if you post regularly, there's no guarantee that you'll actually get traffic, which is usually the point of having a web site. The …

Do you want page views or readers?

Type "get more blog traffic" into Google and you'll get about 70,000,000 results. The results read like snake oil peddlers trying to one-up each other at a state fair. "Increase Blog Traffic NOW!", "25 Tactics Guaranteed to Increase Your Traffic", and "How to Get 1 Million People to Read Your Blog In 1 Day".* Every …

Growing my Personal Blog

Full disclosure - I have never successfully or intentionally grown a blog. Most of my suggestions are speculation until proven. My personal blog has been more of a personal portfolio and a collection of thoughts rather than an audience focused area. But, going into 2018, perhaps it is time to change that and turn it …

Find the right tools for you

Several months ago, after having just read a debate among designers about design software, I jumped on Twitter to vent a bit: Necessary things in design that don't actually matter: 1. Tools and software. 2. Visual polish. 3. Opinions of anyone other than your users. — Mike Shelton (@themikeshelton) August 9, 2017 It was a …

It’s not about the page views

“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” ~Kurt Vonnegut Let’s face it: Blogging is hard. Writing — not to mention writing well — is challenging for most. You’re putting your thoughts and ideas out into the world, for the trolls and the fans alike. Maybe someone …

The Good Kind of Traffic

There are two kinds of traffic, good traffic and bad traffic. As a California resident I spend a non-trivial amount of time finding ways to avoid bad traffic. Good traffic on the other hand is what website building dreams are made of. Having been challenged with finding a way to get 1000 page views to …

Getting more views

The Internet is a vast world. WordPress.com users alone produce about 86.5 million new posts viewed by more than 409 million people each month. With so much competition, standing out from the crowd is no easy feat. To put ourselves in our customer’s shoes, this month, we were given the challenge of outlining a plan …

The shortcut for getting 1000 views

For this installation of the Automattic Design blog post, we are doing something different. As an empathy challenge, we are tasked to think about a common question our customers face, “How do I get more views?” This is important because views are a basic metric to seeing how popular a website is. With a $20 …