I’m allowing a bit of self indulgence today as I celebrate 6 months of Visualising Data.
These first 6 months have seen a steady but satisfying growth in visitors, page views, subscribers and followers across the various ways of consuming my posts. Some of the key metrics used to track my site’s growth are strangely neat and tidy. Fans of the 6 times table will take pleasure from the knowledge that I am about to receive my 12,000th visitor (5000+ in July alone) and that this will be my 72nd post (12 posts per month feels about right). Also, this morning I ‘hit the jackpot’ with my 888th RSS subscriber. I’m still experiencing a slow trickle of facebook fans and twitter followers but that will come in due course hopefully.
I’d like to sincerely thank everybody who has taken the time to read my content and I hope you’ve found most of it interesting and useful. I already receive a fair bit of feedback but if there is anything you wish to share or recommend for taking this blog forward do let me know.
Those of you accessing the site directly will now see a ‘popular posts’ widget in the sidebar from which you can navigate, funnily enough, to the most visited and read posts I’ve published so far. In terms of future ambitions around content, I was recently struck by a character named Jason who added his feedback to a post in Creative Review on which I’d also provided an early comment:
Become a whiney CR blog commenter in 3 easy steps:
- Have a personal agenda which is more to do with bigging yourself up or a personal prejudice against the designer, throw in a couple of personal insults for good measure.
- Link to your own blog or web site of your own utterly mediocre, commercial design, showing you neither have the commissions, intelligence or talent to comment.
- Generally do absolutely nothing active or positive in the world of graphic design except sit on your fat arse and complain.
You are now an the typical CR commenter. Fact.
I’m not sure if this was targeted at me specifically, it might have been, but I have to say I was largely sympathetic to his overall sentiment “those who can, design, those who can’t, comment”. With this in mind I really want to look to increase the amount of personal examples of visualisation design I publish on the site, the opportunities for which haven’t been appropriate to date for differing reasons. I’ve also loads of plans for wide range of post ideas and topics over the next 6 months and am particularly excited about some of the insights articles that will be coming up.
Finally, I’m going to shamelessly finish off by promoting the wide range of consultancy, collaboration and training services that I offer. I am delighted to also announce that I have established a working collaboration with Remode Studios and am looking forward to a fruitful relationship in the future.