Six Revisions Quarterly Report #1

I’d like to give you an update on the things that have happened in the latest quarter (January 1 to March 31, 2015). Also, I want to tell you about some of the stuff I’ll be working on in the next few months.

This is my first quarterly report, so I’m just going to write this up off-the-cuff and iterate on the format in future quarterly reports.

OK, let’s go.

The biggest milestone this quarter was the launch of Six Revisions version 2. This redesign should’ve been launched much, much sooner. I’m still beating myself up for delaying this project for so long. It’s just not OK to have an outdated site design on a site that advocates modern web design and development practices. I won’t let that happen again. Moving forward, site design and functionality will have a much higher priority.

We published 26 posts this quarter, that’s +62.5% more content compared to the previous quarter (Q4 2014). My core focus in the next quarter (and probably the rest of the year) is to continue increasing the amount of content we publish, without sacrificing quality.

The most viewed article published this quarter is Why I Ditched Angular for React by Kumar Sanket.

Here are the latest articles from our long-time authors:

Aaron White, UX developer at Formstack, a U.S. Army veteran, and cofounder of Cowork Btown, talked about why you should seriously consider joining a coworking space.
Joshua Johnson is a designer, photographer, editor, and writer. He currently works at Creative Market as a marketing manager. He was also an editor at Design Shack, a very popular design gallery. He’s managed to do all those things from the comforts of his home, and shares the things he’s learned after years of working from home.
Tobias Günther is the CEO and founder of fournova, the developers of Tower, the hugely popular Git desktop app. For the handful of us who aren’t sold on Git yet, he outlines some great reasons for using Git in his latest article.

We also welcomed 8 new authors this quarter:

Jerry Cao is a UX content strategist at UXPin, and his interests are content design and IA. He talked about the different types of design mockup fidelities and his design prototyping tips.
Kumar Sanket is a freelance full stack developer who works with Angular, HTML, CSS, PHP, and Node. He talked about his reasons for ditching Angular for React (the most popular article this quarter).
Woody Hayday is a multi-talented science-fiction novelist, web developer, and entrepreneur. He runs UK-based web/app development company, StormGate. WordPress plugin development is one of his areas of expertise. He shares some tips for WordPress plugin development based on his experience launching some successful WP plugins. He told me that his next article will probably be after he finishes his current sci-fi novel.
Sreeram Sreenivasan is the founder of Ubiq, a web-based reporting tool. He’s also a web developer and data analyst. He talked about some design strategies for information dashboards.
Avinash Kaza (or Avi for short) is a senior JavaScript developer (Angular, Node, and jQuery) and a product-development manager. He gave us an overview of the the major changes in Angular 1.3.
Caleb Lane is a WordPress security and performance consultant, and the founder of No Worry WP, LLC. He discussed how WordPress security needs to be hardened, and covered some strategies for improving WordPress security.
Miguel Gomez is a web architect, IT project manager, and has been a professional web developer for more than a decade. He works with PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. He gave us an introductory tutorial on Topcoat, an open source CSS framework focused on web performance.
Pedro Semeano is a prolific full-stack developer who’s obsessed with the details, optimizing site performance down to the last byte. He walked us through his strategy for improving site speed using modern developer tools recently. He’s going to talk about some intermediate/advanced ways of optimizing front-end performance in his next article.

In terms of site traffic, there was a +2.01% increase in pageviews this quarter compared to last quarter. There was also a +3.34% increase in new users who came to Six Revisions for the first time this quarter. (Welcome!) However, the average duration people stayed on the site decreased by 7 seconds.

You left 233 comments in the last three months, more than double compared to the past quarter.

On social media, we now have more than 90,700 Twitter followers, an increase of roughly 2.2% over the last three months, and 8,012 Likes on our Facebook page, up by about +0.6% since the start of this quarter.

Areas of Focus

My to-do list is 324 lines long. No joke. And this is a list I started after the Six Revisions version 2 launch, so it doesn’t include other existing tasks prior to the launch.

I’ll just give you some examples of the things I’ll be doing this second quarter. Honestly, this next few months, I’m just playing catch-up. Some of these things should’ve been done a long time ago.

Content

Increase the amount of content Six Revisions publishes without degrading our content-quality and standards.
Write docs and guidelines for commenting, contributing articles to Six Revisions, editorial policies, advertising and sponsorship guidelines, FAQ, and so forth.
Clean up and update as much content in our archives as possible to improve the experience of those reading older content.
Introduce new content types (for example, we just started the open threads recently).
Achieve a more consistent publishing schedule.

Site Features and Improvements

Enhance and tweak the site design (based on your feedback).
Create pages/views that help you navigate some of our past content.
Create profile pages for our authors. These will display longer author biographies as well as all the articles they’ve written on Six Revisions.
Improve the display of search results.
Make the fixed navigation bar more useful.
Implement features that will enhance community discussions.
Reintroduce social-sharing buttons for popular social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to make sharing Six Revisions content on your social media networks easier. (Read why I decided to take them out temporarily for version 2.)

Funding

It’s no secret that in order to grow Six Revisions, I need to seriously work on generating revenue. Here are some things I’ll be working on in this area:

Develop new advertisement and sponsorship models. However, I’m definitely stirring clear of ads that I personally do not like, such as interstitial advertisements and pop-up/modal-window ads.
Reach out to past, current, and new advertisers who have interesting and relevant products and services that are aligned with your interests and tastes.
All advertisements and sponsorships will be clearly marked so that you don’t accidentally click or view them if you don’t want to.
Our advertisement/sponsorship policies, guidelines, and rates will become public, so that you can review them whenever you want. This information will be displayed in the existing Advertising page.
Other ideas I have: Consultancy (front-end development and web performance), taking on more web development projects, writing an ebook(?), and unobtrusive sponsored text ads in our RSS feed.

Wrapping Up

For the next few months, I’ll work tirelessly to advance the role of Six Revisions as a platform and publisher of useful web design and web development content.

There are other things in the roadmap (which was part of my redesign announcement) that I didn’t want to repeat here. Check it out too.

I’m looking forward to a much brighter and more exciting future for this publication.

Last — but certainly not least — I want to thank you for supporting and coming to Six Revisions!

Jacob Gube is the founder of Six Revisions. He’s a front-end developer. Connect with him on Twitter and Facebook.