99 Graphic design in the year 2010

99 Graphic Designs was a dead domain with no traf­fic on it what­so­ever and was brought it back to life with a well thought out mar­ket­ing cam­paign, a lot of love and shear devo­tion and time. In the few months that we have re estab­lished the domain we went from a Page Rank of zero to a Page Rank of 3. We did not pay for adver­tis­ing, nor did we pay some­one else to write our arti­cles or con­tent. We cre­ated the site and its con­tent merely from scratch. Some of the con­tent does stray a lit­tle from graphic and web design but the con­tent itself is very use­ful none the less.

I want to thank each and every one of our read­ers, and sites that link to us and share our love of our arti­cles. We pride our­selves in shar­ing, so any­one can use are arti­cles and dis­trib­ute them as they see fit as long as they credit our site, which by the way helps pro­mote our site in one way or another.
We have some unfin­ished con­tent I know and we are work­ing on get­ting more stuff up. We have been work­ing on some other projects and as soon as they are 100% com­plete we will once again focus more energy on the site. We have uploaded some new things, and we are still adding new con­tent, just not on a daily or weekly basis.

We have over 116 mem­bers that have joined us in the 4 months that we have re-launched the site we expe­ri­ence 300–400 vis­i­tors per day and the num­bers climb every month. I have noticed that the par­tic­i­pa­tion of our vis­i­tors is not where we’d like it to be. I am not going to cre­ate fake com­ments like so many other sites and I am not going to make this into some cheap ren­di­tion of what I want it to be. So in the year 2010 we will focus on, find­ing an eas­ier way for users to com­ment and to give incen­tive for doing so, also we are going to elim­i­nate admin­is­tra­tive approval, and any­thing that has do to with captcha.

I per­son­ally hate captcha, a lot of peo­ple get spam regard­less of captcha, 90% of spam comes from the per­son you actu­ally gave your e-mail address too. So with that being said captcha doesn’t really make a whole lot if since if you ask me. Hers one thing I am sure of 99 Graphic designs, will not sell your info to any third party, In fact peo­ple who have to buy e-mail addresses are not mar­ket­ing effec­tively in my opin­ion. We don’t buy our vis­i­tors, if you come to our site it’s because you enjoy being here. Forc­ing users to do what you want them to do will only end bad.

So 99 Graphic designs as a clear agenda in 2010 we are going to engage our read­ers, so that they will want to par­tic­i­pate and dis­cuss what’s being writ­ten. You will see more con­tro­ver­sial top­ics, a lot more videos that are geared more at ana­lyz­ing design trends. We are in the process of putting together a sem­i­nar. The sem­i­nar is pri­mar­ily to teach our users, to learn how to start a site with no money, no web design or com­puter skills and take that knowl­edge and develop their own site into a PR3 or higher in 4 months of less using no link­ing tricks, or paid adver­tis­ing. We will also incor­po­rate some design tips and tricks, and a whole bunch of tricks of the trades that you just won’t be able to find on a book or in a classroom.

The Sem­i­nar will cost roughly $600 and there will be max­i­mum atten­dees of 30, so spaces are very lim­ited. The course will be 8 hours and will also include an e-book and other lit­er­a­ture to aid the user in get­ting started. We do offer sup­port on our forums absolutely free so we do answer and all ques­tions the user might have. We did not ini­tially want to charge for the sem­i­nar; how­ever this is kind of like our car wash or fundraiser for our web­site. We are using the pro­ceeds to pay for the cost of main­tain­ing the site. So far we have had no dona­tions from the com­mu­nity or pub­lic so I’m afraid we are going to have to raise the money somehow.

We did look into adsense and affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing, how­ever we did not like the clut­tered look of all the ads, we do have a few spon­sors to the right col­umn and we actu­ally use 90% of what we offer.We believe that you shouldn’t pro­mote some­thing you wouldn’t use your­self. So in the year 2010 we are going to put some effort into an eco­nomic sup­port sys­tem to main­tain the site as it is a lot of work as some of you web mas­ters already knows. But we really don’t get a lot of action so by then end of 2010 if they haven’t got­ten a lot of action, they too I’m afraid will come down and be replaced with ads that are paid for annu­ally, that means you could rent a spot to adver­tise your own busi­ness right here. I pre­dict by 2011 we will at a Page rank of 7 or a Page rank of 8. That means by 2011 we will have over 10,000 vis­i­tors a day.

99 graphic designs ulti­mate goal this year is not to gain a lot of traf­fic, our num­ber one goal this year is to find away to get our read­ers to respond, give feed­back. We care about our read­ers and want to know what kinds of top­ics they would like to see, whether or not they like some­thing. We really want to feel close to our read­ers, we want to laugh and joke together; I want to cre­ate a com­mu­nity where every­one shares and enjoys regard­less of profit or earn­ings. I want this site to be some­where were design­ers can go and get real answers from experts or peo­ple who are just a lit­tle more knowl­edge­able than they are.

I remem­ber hav­ing a lot of ques­tions when I was a junior designer and I didn’t have any­one who I could ask. I later learned the answer by acci­dent and it was so sim­ple, it was an answer that could lit­er­ally be uttered in a mat­ter of sec­onds, ver­sus search­ing and comb­ing through the inter­net por­tals and books. Or even worse pay­ing for an answer. I want 99 graphic designs to be a place where a designer can go for any­thing they need. 

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