This is only one man’s experience, but I hope there is value for other designers in this information. One clarification – I’m not going to badmouth anyone. Just like the designers reading this post, the value of a site is not measured by traffic alone. I’m not going to mention sites who accepted my work and didn’t generate significant traffic. I want to keep this all positive.

This is what worked for me.

First off, something obvious. Getting “site of the day” will get you exponentially more traffic than just getting accepted. I mention this because the difference for me was a 100x spike in pageviews in one day. I was shocked at how much more traffic it garnered. When submitting your site I would start of looking at sites that have sites of the day/week/month competitions and make sure that you submit to them first. Most sites show so much work with no real focus and the ones who do more obvious curation have the greatest upside. Awwwwards.com has been the highest contributor of traffic to my site since launch and to this day is still my top referrer. The number two referrer has been thebestdesigns.com, where I was also site of the day.

Secondly, look for sites that don’t feature too much work at once. The WordPress.org showcase is a great example of this and is the number three referrer to my site. They sometimes only post one site a day, and have been known not to post for days at a time. Again, it’s harder to get chosen, but if you do there is a lot more focus on your work.

Creattica.com, cssmania.com, webdesignledger.com and csswinner.com round out my top seven referrers. Then something interesting happens – Google. Although this post is about traffic from design websites, never forget how important content and SEO optimization is.

Cssdesignawards.com, cssbased.com and designfridge.co.uk round out my top eleven. Facebook comes in at number twelve, which is interesting because I have almost 4x the number of Twitter followers as Facebook friends (more on this in a later blog post). Designdelight.net and cssawards.net round out my top fourteen sites.

Why top fourteen you ask? After 14 the amount of traffic these sites generate for me drops off drastically and becomes insignificant. These are the sites that contributed material traffic to my website. On an average day my pageviews are up 500% from my previous design with fewer pages.

The remaining question you may have – do mass site submission services work? In my opinion, no. They may carpet bomb your site to dozens or hundreds of design websites but most of those sites only generate only a handful of hits. Again, traffic is only one measure of success, but for me submitting my work to websites that curate by giving awards or by featuring a limited numbers of designs ended up maximizing new traffic to my website.

When I redesigned my website earlier this year I made a decision to optimize it for mobile, but not to build a mobile website. I tested heavily on iOS and Android devices, used Modernizr to make my rollovers work on touch devices, and set up the proper meta tags and touch icons.

In the last few months the type of traffic I get to my blog began to change. I now get more mobile views than all versions of Internet Explorer combined. Mobile is about 2x IE8 traffic, 5x IE9 traffic and 9x IE7 traffic. IE also has 3x the bounce rate as mobile phones and 50% less time spent. iPad traffic alone is higher than IE9.

It was time to put more energy into mobile. I’m glad I waited.

A few weeks ago Zurb announced Foundation, a framework for responsive design and development, and I instantly decided to evaluate it using my site as a guinea pig. Zurb has always produced great products (including Notable which we use heavily at Atlantic) and Foundation is no exception. For anyone new to the concept, responsive design (oversimplification) is the ability of your website to scale and respond with different options for different screen sizes and types of input. One site, everywhere.

Foundation is a responsive grid system where 14 columns flex to fit larger devices and reflow the page to fit mobile devices. You can specify parts of your site to show on phones, tablets or desktop. Out of the box it does a lot, but since I wasn’t starting with a new site, it took some finessing.

Getting Started

First off, my site was already built on top of a sixteen column grid using 960.gs. I had to rename all of my rows and columns to match the Foundation conventions, and completely rewrite part of their grid system to support 16 columns.

Second, Foundation isn’t meant to be the end all be all of responsive design – I had to add a few other libraries to the mix. Respond.js was used to fix issues with older browsers that don’t understand css media queries, the basis for a lot of the magic of Foundation. Respond.js didn’t seem to like the fact that I was using LESS, so I had to strip out the LESS code to make Respond function. Modernizr remained crucial for detecting touch devices and making sure they don’t see rollovers.

Third, I ended up customizing the css to show and hide elements on different devices, change the nav for each screen size and maximize screen real estate for each device.

All in all it was a great, and relatively painless experience. Check it out! You’re looking at it now, so send it to your phone, or just shrink your browser window. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

I’ve already started using Foundation on a second website, and being responsive from the start has made a huge difference in productivity. Comment below if you have any questions and feel free to share!

Click here to find out more about Foundation.

Update

After launching these updates last month, I went back in a second time and made a few additional enhancements. I wrote a custom responsive images script, removed several javascript libraries that would occasionally conflict with each other, and used the version of Foundation on Github and was able to customize my install to only use the code I need and not the entire library. I also delayed the loading of all social network buttons until after the initial page load, which sped up the perceived load time. All in all I was able to remove nearly 40 server calls and the initial page load is less then 40% of what it was when I first launched my responsive website.

Over the last 5 years at Atlantic I’ve gone from being the sole web designer, to running an amazing creative team made up of designers, developers and project managers. We’ve launched hundreds of websites (this is reality not hyperbole) and at least as many digital marketing campaigns. Everyone involved works at a breakneck pace and there are single weeks when we launch three or four new websites.

This portfolio is the beginning – collecting and showcasing the work we have done over the last 5 years. It’s by no means exhaustive and will continue to grow over time. Special thanks to everyone on my team (and everyone on the WEA D2C team) for making all of this work possible.

DESIGNERS

Edith Levin
Rob Beatty
Lina Gonzalez
Ian Foster
Tiffany Ahee
Amy Stein
Priyanka Batra

DEVELOPERS

Michelle Lamoureaux
Mike Mignano
James DeBlasse
Sean Enright

PROJECT MANAGERS

Jeremy Kutner
Crystal Anderson

Check out the Atlantic Records Prosite here.

Check out the Atlantic Records Digital Media portfolio on Behance.

New business cards.

You’ll be joining a team of 25+ digital creatives working in a fast-paced, exciting environment where your work will be seen by millions of people. The Atlantic Records Digital Media team develops and markets all digital initiatives at Atlantic Records including label and artist websites, interactive promotions such as contests and eCards, mobile apps and websites as well as bespoke online marketing projects.

REQUIRED SKILLS

• Ability to design and build for the web, with a desire to learn more about both from senior team members

• Solid Photoshop and Illustrator skills

• Ability to hand code HTML, CSS and Javascript

OTHER QUALIFICATIONS

* Strong attention to detail and an eye for design* Strong desire to explore new technology and make recommendations on best practices and usage* Ability to communicate effectively to technical and non-technical staff

* Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Web/Graphic Design, User experience or equivalent experience

BONUS ROUND

• Knowledge of PHP, JQuery, Actionscript 3.0 and audio/video editing/encoding

* Experience working for or interning at a major entertainment company

Please note the job is ON-SITE and full-time freelance. Pay rate scales accordingly with candidate’s applicable experience.

Interested parties should send resumes and cover letters to careers@atlantic-records.com with the subject line “Freelance Web Designer/Developer”.

Carmen (Senior Director of Online Analytics at WEA) and I presented a case study from the current Bruno Mars record outlining Warner Music Groups’s strategy for using social media and analytics to track success across our artist’s web properties with an end goal of converting music listeners into customers.

Read more about our presentation here.

How do you answer the question, “What is the business impact of my social media efforts?” How do you connect the conversations happening on your social networks to the systems that measure business performance? In this real-world session you’ll hear from Eric Snowden, VP of Creative & Technology at Atlantic Records and Carmen Sutter, Senior Director of Data Services at Warner Music Group as they share how Warner Music Group is leveraging the power of data to make smart social media strategy decisions and tie their fan aggregation and traffic-driving efforts to bottom line performance.

Today my site has been featured in the WordPress.org showcase. They only pick a handful of sites a month so it’s an honor to be chosen among the huge portfolio of WordPress sites. For a short period of time, I was even the top rated site on WordPress.org. Check out my site on WordPress.org.