WPCandy’s 2010 year in review

9 Comments

Posted by on

It’s almost the year’s end. As 2010 becomes 2011, it’s fun to get retrospective. We’re diving into that in a big way here today, first with our year in review post.

Just to be clear: this is WPCandy’s year in review, not our review of WordPress itself in 2010. For that, you might want to check back later today. Right now, we’re looking at what we’ve created this year, what has worked, a little of what hasn’t, and where we are headed next.

Let’s get started.

Topics covered

We cover a number of things here, but primarily we stick to covering plugins, themes, BuddyPress, and WordCamps. We use the “WordPress” generic whenever there’s something that doesn’t nicely fit into any of the other areas. Personally I really like when we’ve featured WordCamp reviews, partly because they are written by contributors to the site (usually first time contributors) and it shows how each WordCamp is unique. One of our goals for 2011 is to have a feature/review post for every WordCamp that takes place.

The tag cloud below will show you what we’ve covered most, topic-wise.

Content published

Perhaps more interesting than the topics we cover is the way in which we cover them. While we use tags to describe the topics a post is about, we use categories to describe the kind of content. If I had to pick, I’d say tutorial and feature posts are my favorite things to publish. Among feature posts, some of my favorites from 2010 include our WordPress/GPL Timeline, the comparison of WordPress Theme Frameworks (now at 23, by the way), and Brian’s review of WordPress market share numbers.

The tag cloud below will show you the types of content we’ve published most this year.

People mentioned

WordPress, and particularly writing about WordPress, is mostly about the people. We tag people when they are “mentioned” in a post, and it’s fun to look back at 2010 and see who we talked about the most.

When it comes to people, I really thought the first few video interviews went well, and one of our goals is to increase the rate at which we publish them.

The tag cloud below will show you the people we’ve mentioned most this year.

Companies mentioned

Of course, we cover a number of commercial WordPress (and non-WordPress) companies as well. We covered a few site launches exclusively this year, gave a lot of their stuff away, and I would say created a resource here where big news from all of them will be highlighted. What do you think?

The tag cloud below will show you the companies we’ve covered most this year.

Locations mentioned

WordPress happens all over the world, which is why we tag locations as well. Eventually, we’d like to have locations working to such an extent that you can, sort of, find WordPress news and events around you. We’re not there yet, but why not plan a bit?

The tag cloud below will show you the locations we’ve covered most this year.

Events mentioned

Finally, we talk a lot about events. I already mentioned the WordCamps we covered this year, but specifically WPCandy was able to attend WordCamp Detroit, WordCamp MSP, and WordCamp Louisville. I hope to increase that number in 2011, but whether we do that or not one of our goals is to cover more WordPress related events, and to do it well.

The tag cloud below will show you the events we’ve covered most this year.

December 2010 statistics

This post also doubles as our monthly WPCandy in review post, so let’s look at some numbers. We aren’t only about numbers of course, but it’s fun to see things grow over time. In the table below I’ve included numbers from October to November, so you can see the change.

MetricOctober 2010November 2010December 2010
Google Analytics41,892 unique visits50,877 unique visits57,611 unique visits
Twitter4,433 followers4,704 followers5,070 followers
Facebook224 fans277 fans326 fans
RSS/Feedburner~6,500 subscribers~6,900 subscribers~7,100 subscribers
Comments202 reader comments503 reader comments388 reader comments

Our goals for this month were:

  • We plan to cross 60,000 unique visitors in December.
  • We plan to cross 7,000 RSS subscribers.
  • We plan to reach 700 themes in Theme Finder.
  • We plan to see 600 or more reader comments.

We didn’t quite hit 600 comments, but we still did a great number. I’m also going to give us the 60,000 uniques goal, since we’re really close (and we might cross the goal by midnight anyway!).

Oh, and for those wondering: we are going to be publishing numbers in regards to our iPhone app and how that’s doing. Once the final numbers for December hit, we’ll be publishing a feature detailing how it went, how it worked, and whether we would do our reverse launch deal again. Stay tuned.

Goals for January 2011

Our goals for 2011 are big, but they also aren’t very easy to put into bullet form here. So we’re going to stick with the month-to-month goals. For some reason they seem a bit more attainable that way!

  • We will cross 70,000 unique visitors in January.
  • We will cross 7,500 RSS subscribers.
  • We will reach 800 themes in Theme Finder.
  • We will see more than 400 reader comments.

Now, what do you think?

You’re the one at the other end of the computer screen: what do you think we should do better in January? Heck, go crazy and talk about 2011 itself. It might be fun to look back in December 2011 and see where our readers wanted us to be in a year.

9 thoughts on “WPCandy’s 2010 year in review”

  1. impressive rise in number of visitors as this is my third month in pro-blogging am also covering wordpress, hope i can reach somewhere to you in coming time.
    Wish a very happy new year

  2. Wpcandy has become one of my most important sites to keep myself updated with the latest WordPress news. This site also offers insights of WordPress trends and development.

    I’ll be back for more definitely!

  3. I’m mostly reading the site’s news through my RSS reader but I think I’ll be able to help with the comments goal…the original post is just a click away and some commenters do add value to the original post so why not show up more often 😉

  4. I really like the use of Custom Taxonomies on WPCandy.com although a little upset you’ve not talked about me so I can get a mention! 😉 We’ll see if I can change that in 2011 huh?

    • Very soon, Tim. We’ll be simplifying a bit, going back to just a couple of guys, and maybe experimenting with the format a bit.

      What do you like best about the podcast? And, maybe more importantly, what would you like to see out of a WordPress focused podcast like WPCandy’s?

Comments are closed.