All in all it was a successful year here at John Sansom dot Com. In terms of traffic, the blog had almost 400 thousand page views. I know. I don’t understand why either – but I’ll take it! This years page views were more than half of all the total page views in the 5 year life of the blog. A repeat performance next year and we’ll be on track to hit the magic 1 million milestone!
The blog experienced a face lift this year, with a new site design running on the Genesis Framework resulting in a much richer and improved visitor experience.
We also took the plunge to dark side by supporting advertising on the site. I had put off doing this for a long time, viewing adverting as an evil nuisance of the internet.
Producing and sharing quality content is my core focus and so I made sure to place advertising that did not detract from this. Content is and always will be, front and center. Interestingly I’ve not had a single complaint since introducing advertising and so I think I’m getting the balance right. I wanted to take visitor experience to the next level and to do that I was going to need to invest financially in infrastructure and services. Supporting advertising here on the site paved the way.
Using the revenue I have been able to fund a number of initiatives, all with the goal of improving visitor experience:
- Migrated to a new hosting provider WestHost – Improving site performance, availability and offering excellent support service.
- Moved to a professional and reliable email delivery platform by using Aweber.
- Deployed a CDN (Content Delivery Networking) solution offered by MaxCDN – Improving site speed globally by using local Edge locations.
This is in danger of turning into a web-design/technical post, which is not what we’re about here so I’ll stop now :-)
Anyway, thank you all for occasionally stopping by and taking a few minutes to read what I post here. I really do appreciate it. Thank you and have a great year in 2014!
The Year 2013 in Numbers
- 1 – Microsoft Certified Master Award
- 1 – “Blog of the Year” Nomination <- Still time to vote for me to win. Pretty please.
- 1 – Free SQL Community Ebook Published
- 43 – Something For The Weekend(SFTW) Posts
- 66 – Blog Posts
- 2,055 – Downloads of the free ebook DBA JumpStart
- 2,394 – Twitter Followers
- 5,306 – Email Subscribers
- 3,646 – Highest Daily Pageviews (All Time = 4,005)
- 400,692 – Total Pageviews (All Time 769,067 )
Most Popular Blog Content of 2013
- How to Become a SQL Server DBA
- My Guide to Passing MCTS Exam 70-432
- Top 10 Junior DBA Interview Tips
- Top 10 Free SQL Server Tools
- SQL Server Essentials – Part 1: The Database Administrator’s Primary Responsibility
- Your Road To Becoming a DBA
- SQL Server Books
- Performing fast SQL Server delete operations
- 10 Character Traits of Outstanding DBAs
- Top 5 SQL Server Forums
