MAS o Menos

While moving my blog posts over from Blogger to WordPress, I came face to face with a few old posts where I declared grand plans for my web sites. What became immediately obvious was how far off my predictions were. Everything was off. Although I exceeded my goals with DeepFitness, I fell far short with INeedCoffee. The CriticalMAS conversion went faster than expected. And as a result Digital Colony has suffered.

Where have I been wrong?

1. INeedCoffee. Just a year ago I planned to start a new coffee web site to replace INeedCoffee. Then a few people talked some sense into me. INeedCoffee went commercial and everything changed.
2. CriticalMAS. My plan was to keep this site on auto-pilot, but Blogger continued to get more and more buggy. Google’s unwillingness to fix Blogger for non-BlogSpot accounts drove me to redesign this site.
3. DeepFitness. My goal was to have 800 XHTML compliant articles. Once I studied the traffic and how the site was making money that number was pushed up to 2300. The original goal was not sufficient.
4. Digital Colony. The time spent on my other sites was taken from Digital Colony.

Along the way I did learn to not trust Alexa as a useful metric for site popularity. I’ve seen sites far more popular than mine with worse Alexa rankings. I no longer look at Alexa.

I hesitate to publicly state my web goals given my track record. Maybe it just takes time to get good at predicting? With that said, here are my immediate web goals.

1. CriticalMAS. Finish moving all legacy photo galleries to SmugMug. This is time consuming since I need to locate the original photos. Moving eight years of content and handling redirects gracefully has been educational.
2. INeedCoffee. Major redesign - both front-end and back-end. I owe it to my contributors to create a better showcase for their efforts.

That is it for now. I also have a brand new project in mind, but will not pursue it until these two immediate web goals are completed. I think.

Tags: criticalmas, deepfitness, digitalcolony, ineedcoffee