Just a few days ago marked the third birthday of this website. Once again, I didn’t give the site the attention I had planned to. Nevertheless, I’ll publish a review of the year as a whole and look at what the next year might bring.

Statistics

Here’s a quick look at some details of the blog this year:

• Blog posts: 8 (exactly the same as last year)
• Visits: 13,896
• Visitors: 12,693
• Pageviews: 17,488
• Avg. time on the site: 0:34
• Backlinks (as measured by Open Site Explorer): 318
• Google Pagerank: 3
• Alexa site rank: 890,930

Just like last year, I failed to even post once a month, but visits, vistors, and pageviews grew substantially. However, the average time on site decreased by over 10 seconds and visitors finding my site through a search engine increased to almost 85%. I wrote a number of shorter posts this year, so that might be partially responsible for the change in numbers. My site also made it into the top million sites on the internet according to Alexa.com. A million is quite a few, so I’m not sure if that’s something to be proud of or not.

Goals

I set a few goals in my two year review post, and now that year three completed, I guess it’s time to review.

• Release a commercial WordPress theme. I released a development version of a free theme, but that doesn’t really count.
• Get Trusty Press running again, this time in a new direction. This was a failure for the second year in a row.
• Make Theme Signal a valuable resource for locating the perfect WordPress theme. After looking at my goals for this project, I’ve actually started a new project that will hopefully better address the issues this site was intended to solve. It is currently still in the development stage, so we’ll see what happens over the course of this next year.

So the goals for this past year didn’t really pan out, but through it I think I have a better idea of the direction I hope to go with this blog and my business in general. With that in mind, my goals for this next year are a bit different.

1. Increase the pageviews of this blog to over 50,000. That’s a pretty big increase over the current number, but goal #2 will explain how I hope to achieve it.
2. Publish at least 6 highly detailed and in-depth tutorials on key WordPress features such as custom metaboxes, reusible template files, data sanitization, etc.
3. Release an open source theme toolkit that will take the hassle out of many of the repetitive theme development tasks I cover in the upcoming in-depth tutorials.

I have a few other ideas up my sleeve, but those will have to wait. See you next year!