Apparently, this is what happens when my designers work late without me.

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.

With Instagram, I was a late adopter. Maybe it was resistance to using the iPhone as my primary camera, or filters anyone can use, or the idea that I actually would want to see my friend’s photos, but it took me a long time to warm up to Instagram. Over Thanksgiving, I spent some time on my grandfather’s farm in rural Illinois and began to see the appeal and have since become addicted to the app and now check it as much, if not more than Facebook and Twitter.

Since Instagram has no real native web presence (aside from a simple single photo viewer) I set about looking for a plugin to pull in my most recent photos and found Instapress.

With Instapress, the WordPress admin can select any feed and choose how many images to display, whether to show the picture’s title or not, and whether to use a lightbox to display your images inline or not. The plugin is extremely flexible and can be used as a shortcode in a post to show a single image, as a sidebar widget, or can be embedded in a page with a single line of code. So far I’ve been extremely happy with its reliability and simplicity and highly recommend it to anyone looking for an easy way to integrate Instagram into their WordPress Blog.

Read more about Instapress here.

Check out my most recent Instagram photos here.

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.

New business cards.

Today I was awarded the Robert M Montgomery Outstanding Young Alumnus Award from Illinois Wesleyan University. I was presented the award at the annual alumni lunch at the Shirk Center on the IWU campus. The other award winners and I were also announced at halftime at the Titan homecoming football game with the rest of the homecoming court. Yesterday I taught the “Back to School” class “Connecting Fans with Bands” where I outlined my progression from IWU student to VP at Atlantic and how we use design and technology to promote our artists. Overall, it was an amazing experience and I’m extremely honored to be recognized from a university that has given me so much.

Read more about the events on WJBC.com.

IPads, usb ports and outlets at every seat in the Delta terminal at JFK. Why don’t I fly Delta more often?

Photos of the Occupy Wall Street protests from last weekend.

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.