April 2008 marked the second full year my blog-web site combo has run! The site averages just about 600 hits a day with 120 unique visits. There are more than 40 pages and 120 blog posts now. There have been nearly 200 comments on my posts and Akismet tells me that it has munched 8,890 spam items since I installed it.
The most common entry pages are my free tutorials. The web shop has more than 80 items (though some seem to regularly, gratifyingly go out of stock!) with a few being added each week.
The site got a redesign and new gadgets added this year. I streamlined some parts and added the widgets for the web shop and contact pages. There are a few new freebie tutorials in the works and I am slowly fleshing out my gallery section. I started using Flickr to keep a record of what is happening with my art over time, added my polymer clay blogroll to my sidebar on the blog front page.
Overall I’ve learned an awful lot just by the exercise of running this place – improving my photography, my technique, focusing on the core parts of a project, social networking and on and on. Here’s hoping that year #3 is just as gratifying as the first two.
2 Responses
Congratulations on reaching your second year! I hope to start selling and have some sort of established line of work one day. LOL! You have a great site and your flowers are so precious. I will have to check our tutorials. I am actually looking how to make an Iris flower, but haven’t had much luck finding a good tutorial. Congrats again!
Thanks Susie!
Depending on how brave you feel, if you’d like to send me an email with an example (google photos or some such) of what type of Iris you were thinking) I’d be happy to make you a diagram for that.
I know that Cat of http://www.catherienarts.com had a tutorial for a bearded iris in an issue of Polymer Cafe so if you have local friends or a guild with copies of that, its one option.