PHPMAGAZINE.NET Latest updates
Since March 2005 we have almost tested everything in phpmagazine.net, and today I'm really happy with the current results and the status of this project. The website today have more than 20 active blogs, almost the same design, different colors, different ideas for each blog. Recently I have started making lot of changes to make it more suitable, and today I think I become very near to the design that I was looking for.
The design is focused on three things :
1- Simplicity : Single coloumn about 170px width and content in the middle taking about 530px in page width. The total page is a 800x600 which looks very well for the different monitor display.
2- Different brand for each blog : Each blog have its own color and logo
3- A global approach to makes you think that you are in the same website : In spite of the different logos there something that makes you think that you are still in the same website like the stylesheet, green titles, the same template used and the link in the top page to the main website.
Almost a year after the launch of the phpmagazine.net website, I'm glad that the website have gained a big notority in the community to become very official and serious website and there is today more and more regular readers. There is about 22% of regular readers which is really very interesting in my opinion and we took many decisions to make this website attract more regular readers, but we have more work to do that's sure !
According to stats the most popular blog on phpmagazine.net is the AJAX Magazine, launched on June 2005 and making really high traffic today, then the Googling blogging and PHP, The Blog's Blog, Enterprise PHP, ... and the list is very very long.
Advertising strategy
Maybe many have noticed that we have dropped all ads from phpmagazine.net, there is no ads anymore ! First advertising for me personaly wasn't a source of revenue even that I earned a lot in the past months, but I was more interested to experiment new things everytime and I found myself very attached to the revenue, adsense, YPN, Chitika ... and no more interested in the main focus and things that I want to implement in this website. That's why for the second year of phpmagazine.net we are no longer using any advertising even that advertising today will be more interesting.
Our strategy this year is to focus on the content that we are delivering and the products too. There is many software that I'm developping and talking about here and there so I'm more interested to make them better and talk about. In the other side we'll keep advertising just for some partners. For example the VoiceXML PHP Magazine was an official media sponsor of the O'Reilly's first Emerging Telephony Conference ETEL 2006.
Today we are making about 100,000 page views monthly, so maybe when I'll reach the 500,000 PV we'll have another strategy or decision, but until that time we are very happy with the product that we have today and we are working hard to make it better.
