I have been an avid follower of blogs such as Smashing Magazine and Web Designer Depot for a long time. A little over 3 months ago, I decided that it was time that I also gave back to the design community, hence, Design Informer was born. The blog officially opened on October 31st, 2009. During the first week, the blog didn’t really get a lot of visitors. Once in a while someone would drop in and leave a comment and retweet the articles but for the most part, the blog was pretty much void of any response.

Design Informer is 3 Months Old

Incredible Growth in Just a Few Months

Screenshot

I have been an avid follower of blogs such as Smashing Magazine and Web Designer Depot for a long time. A little over 3 months ago, I decided that it was time that I also gave back to the design community, hence, Design Informer was born. The blog officially opened on October 31st, 2009. During the first week, the blog didn’t really get a lot of visitors. Once in a while someone would drop in and leave a comment and retweet the articles but that was it.

During the second week of the blog, I published a post entitled 20 Extraordinary Blogs With Unique Post Designs and this post garnered a lot of attention. The following week, Smashing Magazine posted an article about the "Death of the Blog Post" and because of its popularity, my post received
lots of views and comments as well.

That was the turning point to the growth of my blog. Since then, slowly but surely, the blog has continued to grow week after week. We’ve had some great statistics that I will show you in just a bit.

How Did You Hear About Design Informer?

McLeod40
Through Twitter!

bryanconnor
I believe it was through a retweet of someone I follow linking to the 20 Unique Post Designs page.

acvonesch
Found di after reading one of your Smashing Magazine articles.

smoothemoose
we’ve been really getting into design lately and your blog came up. thought we’d follow you!

kevinholesh
I heard about DI from @dougneiner.

yenio2010
found your site through the Netsetter.

esterliquori
I found your articles with TheWebBlend than in some others designer blogs.

frankvanleersum
@designinformer via a RT by Smashing Mag, and your article about daily design

ArtemR
@designinformer I found you in this post http://j.mp/91CJJp but it’s your content that made me follow.

EREllsworth
@designinformer I started following you after your Smashing article about the 365 challenge.

A Big Thank You

I just want to say that without the amazing support that we have received thus far from the design community, then Design Informer wouldn’t be what it is today. Also, a shoutout goes to Vitaly and Smashing Magazine as well as to Walter from WDD for promoting some of my articles. These guys have inspired me to start the blog. I’m thankful to everyone for the retweets, moos, floats, bumps, stumbles and for the different ways that you have spread the word about Design Informer. I also want to thank the different sponsors as well.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that these people are awesome. They all have written some great, quality articles for the blog. Make sure you visit their sites as well.

Thank You!

Some Random Facts

Posts and Comments
To date, we have a total of 73 posts and 2,718 comments. These are the most popular posts so far on Design Informer:

Site Statistics
Here are the stats for our first three months.

  • 175,269 Unique Visits
  • 291,924 Pageviews
  • Average time on site is 01:42
  • 3,404 Twitter Followers
  • 832 RSS Subscribers
  • Pagerank 5 in Google
  • 23,531 Alexa Ranking

Stats

Design Something Every Day

The Community
So far, the response to the challenge has been amazing. There are over one hundred people who are currently doing it. I’m just glad that I was able to make a difference in the design community. I have recieved incredible feedback from many of the designers. If you’d like to see the best designs, make sure to follow me on Twitter as I will be announcing when the Smashing Magazine round-up will be showcased. Also, if you haven’t already registered your name and designs, make sure to do so here.

Daily 365
Since I did start the challenge, I wanted to participate in it as well. I have my own side blog which I’ve been updating once in a while with my new daily designs. I’ll get around this week to updating it with all of my daily designs. Don’t worry, I’ve been keeping up with the challenge. I’ve just been extremely busy to update the site everyday. I will do a better job of it this month.

Chinese Proverb

It's a Fight

So What’s New?

Site Tweaks and Updates

Things have been really busy here at Design Informer, and that’s a great thing. We are still tweaking a few things with the site to try to make it load faster and work much smoother. We are also thinking of switching to another server to further accomodate the traffic that has been pouring in, so please bear with us if you experience performance issues from time to time.

Footer

A Redesign is Coming Soon

I’m also happy to say that we are doing a redesign of Design Informer. It’s actually going to be a more minimalistic design. Don’t worry, the colors will stay the same, except we’ve improved the typography, the site structure, navigation, and the site will load a lot faster. I’ve shown it to a few people and I’ve had tremendous feedback so far. Most people seem to like the redesign. I’m done with the CSS/XHTML of the design and the next step is to convert it to WordPress, which could take a while. Oh, and I’ve included a sneak-peek of our footer design on the new site.

Introducing Coding Informer

We’re glad to announce that a new site in the Informer brand is coming. Coding Informer is something that we’ve been planning for a while, and now, it’s finally coming to fruition. We don’t have an exact target date yet, but definitely watch for it. A friend of mine, Brendan Sera-Shriar from Montreal, Canada will be helping me with the new blog. Brendan is a popular guy in the WordPress community and he has organized multiple WordPress events. He is very much involoved in the development and open-source community.

Coding Informer will have the same exact top-notch quality as Design Informer. There will be lots of tutorials that will focus more on the development of websites. We will be posting about XHTML/CSS, HTML5, CSS3, WordPress, jQuery, and lots more. We’re very excited about this project and hope you will support it as well.

Coding Informer

We Would Love to Hear Your Thoughts

Again, we’d like to end this news post by asking you what you think. Please let us know what you think of Coding Informer, a redesign, and what you think of Design Informer? Also, feel free to offer us your suggestions and your thoughts on how we can improve Design Informer. Our readers are very important to us and we will definitely consider your suggestions and opinions. We have some other news that we couldn’t reveal yet, but might do so in the future. More excellent posts, interviews, and giveaways are coming this month so stay tuned.

Thank you for reading and please share this with the rest of the community by bumping, blending, stumbling and retweeting. Thanks again!