Charity of the Month - December Results
The results of the first “Charity of the Month” have been fantastic. I am happy to say that I will be donating $246.97 to Doctors Without Borders. The majority of the money came from the Yahoo! Publisher Network ads that I have on the site, although some did come from the Chitika ads that I had up for part of the month. The final number includes the full unaudited revenue for the month, but I will be covering whatever is audited. I will actually be covering the entire amount because the YPN money won’t be arriving until sometime in mid-February.
The future of this program seems very promising because the average revenue per day has been increasing steadily and I have a sizeable affiliate reward coming soon.
Now, I need a suggestion for this month’s charity. I am looking for a worthy (and credible) organization that might be overlooked for some reason.
The Year in Review
The very first article on this website was published on June 18th of 2005. I believe I was just about to finish up my senior year of high school and decided that I would need something to occupy me over the summer. I had gotten into web design and publishing earlier in the school year for an inquiry project and thought it would be a good release for me. The site began mostly as a backup of my writing and class projects and remained completely private for its first few weeks.
The instant I published my first article, I knew that the site could only grow and be…interesting…if people contributed and argued in the post’s comments. So, I began the difficult task faced by every internet writer (fine, blogger) of publicizing their website. My task was especially tough because I decided that I did not want to involve my friends and family. The site’s first comment was “hynngngh”, not exactly a philosophical breakthrough but it showed me that people are willing to take the time to post something.
The digg effect - a visual analysis
A couple days ago, my list of the top 10 redesigns of the year was “dugg” to the front page of the popular digg.com.
I took a few screenshots of the action, so let’s get started…
Sponsoring Charity
This article was originally titled “Chitika for Charity”, but due to some auditing complications, I’ve decided to change to the Yahoo! Publisher Network for now. I only had Chitika eMiniMalls (that is not an affiliate link because, frankly, I wouldn’t recommend them) running for a single day during the month of October, but on that day, six clicks were audited to two, and the revenue for the day went down by over 80%.
Obviously, a single day is not fair treatment, but I actually have over a month of Chitika under my belt and I will be waiting until the audited revenue for November is released before I decide on anything. There is an excellent article at Work Boxers about this as well as some other discouraging aspects about Chitika.
Now, to get back into what I meant to say. A discussion about ads following my recent redesign got me thinking about whether or not I should keep them running. The hosting costs for this site with Dreamhost are fairly low and I just got a wonderful new job, so the money isn’t really the point of this website. However, since the site is making money, why not keep the ads running and give the money to someone who needs it more than I do?
Another Redesign
I had a little creative surge this morning, and what better outlet to release it than my website. That’s right, this entire layout is approximately two hours old and will hopefully last a little longer. I decided to go to a one column layout (although keep an eye on Garrett Dimon’s site for an opposite transition) because it still is all about the content and what better way to feature it than give the impression of a page.
Unfortunately, I still don’t do colors, but I did go out on a limb (by my standards) by using a light shade of gray! The inspiration for this new layout comes from sites like Niggle and Powazek that have brought their content to the forefront without discarding the essential blog features. Hopefully, this will inspire a little more interactivity and discussions.