For the past 4 years or so i’ve been working on and off on theleavingcert.com. The difference between it any my others projects is that it’s always been on and off. Not on and then off, off, off…
It was originally a plain html site, then it become a forum (phpbb i think), then a joomla based site, now it’s a wordpress site. It was the first site i ever created so i suppose it’s only natural that i’d be messing about with it constantly. I settled on wordpress because it was what i knew best…
Since our latest revamp (in which we’ve merged with leaving-cert.net, created several sub sites and added new features), traffic has exploded. Here’s some stats from september 1st to september 17th and i’ve compared them to the same period last year…
As you can see, visits have risen 433%, pageviews have risen 341% and the average time spent on site has increased by over 30 seconds. Let’s ignore the negative bits for now, i don’t want them to spoil the party 🙂 We’re delighted with that growth because we regard this as a fairly quiet time (history shows us that). We’re almost at the stage now where we’re averaging 1000 visits /day during the week. With more new sites and features to come, we feel that can only increase.
However, things weren’t always looking so rosey. The site could easily have been sold for peanuts or gone on the scrap heap. One of the reasons why it’s doing well now is because i didn’t let it die and kept chipping away at it and trying to do things differently. Experimenting. All that experimenting is starting to pay off and of course when you see stats and graphs like the one above, it becomes much easier to motivate yourself and keep working. It’s a like a snowball running downhill.
What people forget about the snowball effect though is that the snowball must at some stage come to stop or slam in to something and explode. Online, the roll downhill is often extremely speedy and as a result short lived. There are ways to increase the speed but in doing that you increase the risk of a massive explosion. In order to protect yourself from that massive explosion, you always have to think about tomorrow, not just today.
So in this case, persistence did pay off and the rewards for that persistence probably won’t come right now or in a few months time, they’ll be longer term rewards because i must put the site’s health before my own wealth…