No, no. I didn’t go researching modern-day witchcraft or anything like I did with Taoism. No, I’m taking web design lessons from a set of entirely fictional witches who live on a flat, circular world which rests on the back of four elephants, who in turn stand on the back of the Great A’Tuin, a turtle that swims through space.
It’s called the Discworld, and it is the subject of forty-one of the best darned books I’ve ever read in my life. The witches of the kingdom of Lancre are the protagonists of several of these books. They’re a cross between village doctors, local magistrates, and (on relatively rare occasions) magical troubleshooters.
If they were designers, they’d be the scariest and probably the best designers in the business. Here’s what I’ve learned from them:
If you want to change the world around you, you first have to know who you are. And then, you have to have absolute confidence in who you are, knowing both your capabilities and your limits. Esmeralda Weatherwax defines this trait. It is her nearly unshakable confidence and her will, which make her the most powerful witch known. Officially, the witches don’t have leaders, and Granny Weatherwax is the leader that they definitely don’t have.
Designers, of course, have to learn how to be wrong, and then deal with it. Granny does, too. The problem is, if you get too used to thinking you’re wrong all the time, it can become a hard habit to break. You can’t do your best work by second-guessing yourself at every turn. You have to see if you’re actually right or wrong first, and go from there.
Granny trusts her knowledge and experience, and when she is proven wrong, she trusts the new knowledge and experience. Eventually.
Granny Weatherwax
Enjoy Yourself
What’s the point of any of this if you can’t enjoy yourself? Looking after a whole community isn’t easy, but Gytha “Nanny” Ogg finds the time to eat and drink rather heavily, dance whenever she feels like it, and sing loudly enough to send her entire village literally running for cover. She’s been married three times, has fifteen children, and still she checks under her bed for strange men at night because “you never know your luck”. She takes full advantage of everything she can get from being the village witch, and matriarch to half the people in the village besides.
In learning about (and selling) the importance of our work as designers, it’s easy to get lost in all of the grand ideas. We’re trying to make sites that are accessible, usable, beautiful, and hopefully profitable, and each of these is almost a discipline unto itself. It’s worth taking the time to just sit there and marvel at all the cool stuff the web can do, and enjoy being a part of it.
Nanny Ogg
People Want Magic…
The witches of the Discworld very rarely use “actual” magic, beyond their flying brooms. They can. Granny Weatherwax in particular is terrifyingly powerful. Mostly, though, they practice a generalist sort of medicine, and a whole lot of what they call “Headology”. People are always coming and asking for magical solutions to things that can be fixed by far more practical means. Headology is mostly a means of making people think something magical is going on, leaving the witches free to do what’s necessary in peace.
For most users, everything we do seems magical. The very act of making a static web page seems mystical to them, especially if you do it with [gasp] a text editor. And the simple truth is that like the villagers in Lancre, they don’t want that illusion broken most of the time. They want something to magically fix their problem. If you can help them to solve their problems, but make it feel like them was magic, you’ve got a winning formula.
… But People Have to Work Things Out For Themselves
The younger witches often ask questions like, “But why can’t we just use magic to solve all of these problems?” The answer, of course, is that magic can cause as many problems as it solves. Magic is a blunt instrument, and most situations with people need something more like a scalpel, a screwdriver, or even a small paintbrush.
Ask any therapist. Lasting change comes when you guide people to the solutions, and let them do the rest. Trying to force your solutions on them basically always backfires. For example, I could point at the many ways algorithms are going horribly wrong in the world of social media. You can do your best as a designer to make things easier for your users, but you can’t do everything for them, and you shouldn’t try.
Know When to Go For Help
Over the course of the books, there are a few witches in training, including Magrat Garlick, Agnes Knitt, and Tiffany Aching. While they all have amazing story arcs that I just don’t have space for in this article, there was one thing they all had to learn: when to ask for help. The witches of Lancre are fiercely independent, and they are mostly expected to handle problems—even the big ones—for themselves, but occasionally they run into problems too big for any one witch.
Designers are going to run into those sorts of problems a lot more often, frankly. There’s so much to learn out there, and it’s rare that any one designer will come up with perfect solutions all on their own. Everything we do is built on the work of thousands who came before, and keeping all of that in one head just isn’t going to happen. You have to stand on your own as a designer, and take responsibility for what you build, but you can’t do everything alone.
When in doubt, try to get at least two outside opinions. Remember: you need three witches for a coven; two witches is just an argument.
Another year come and gone! As we do each year, let’s take a look at the past year from an analytical by-the-numbers perspective and do a goal review. Most importantly, I’d like extend the deepest of thanks to you, wonderful readers of CSS-Tricks, for making this place possible.
This site has a new design, doesn’t it? It does! I’ll write something more about that soon. If you have something to say about it right now, feel free to use our new public community on Spectrum. If it’s a bug or thought that doesn’t really need to be public, our our contact form would be great.
I can count the times I pop into Google Analytics per year on my two hands these days, but we’ve had the basic snippet installed since day one around here, so it’s great for keeping an eye on site traffic and usage over the long term. Especially since CSS-Tricks has been a fairly basic WordPress install the entire time with little by the way of major infrastructural changes that would disrupt how these numbers are gathered.
Page views over the entire lifespan of CSS-Tricks.
We had 91 million page views this year, up from 75 million last year. That’s great to see, as we were at 75 in 2017, 77 in 2016, and 72 in 2015. We’ve managed to do a bigger leap this year than perhaps we ever have. I’d love make a go at 100 million next year! That’s based on 65 million sessions and 23 million users.
Perhaps some of that traffic could be attributed to the fact that we published 636 Posts this year, up from 595 last year. I’d like to think they are higher quality too, as we’ve invested much more in guest writing and had a more thorough editing process this year than we ever have. We’ve had Geoff Graham as lead editor all year and he’s doing a phenomenal job of keeping our content train rolling.
For the last few years, I’ve been trying to think of CSS-Tricks as this two-headed beast. One head is that we’re trying to produce long-lasting referential content. We want to be a site that you come to or land on to find answers to front-end questions. The other head is that we want to be able to be read like a magazine. Subscribe, pop by once a week, snag the RSS feed… whatever you like, we hope CSS-Tricks is interested to read as a hobbyist magazine or industry rag.
We only published 25 new pages this year, which are things like snippets, almanac entries, and videos. I’d really like to see that go up this year, particularly with the almanac, as we have lots of new pages documented that we need to add and update.
I almost wish our URLs had years in them, because I still don’t have a way to scope analytic data to only show me data from content published this year. I can see the most popular stuff from the year, but that’s regardless of when it was published, and that’s dominated by the big guides we’ve had for years and keep updated.
Interestingly, flexbox is still our #1 guide, but searches for the grid guide are only narrowly behind it. It depends on the source though. I can see data for on-site search through WordPress.com (via Jetpack) which show grid searches at about 30% less than flexbox. Google Analytics have it about 60% less, which would be Google searches that end up on CSS-Tricks. Nevertheless, those are the two most popular search keywords, on-site and off. From #3 onwards: svg, border, position, animation, underline, background, display, transition, table, button, uppercase, css, bold, float, hover, transform.
I love that! People are landing on the site looking for fundamental CSS concepts, and hopefully finding what they need.
Site search has been a bit of a journey. Native WordPress search isn’t good enough for a site this big. For a long time I used Google Custom Search Engine, which is nice because it’s as good as Google is, but bad because it’s a bit hard to style nicely and is covered in ads that don’t make enough money to be worth it and are too expensive to remove. Last year I was using Algolia for a while, which is a fantastic product, but I needed to give it more development effort than I was able to at the time. Now I’m back on WordPress search but powered by Jetpack, which brings the power of cloud-hosted Elasticsearch, which is pretty sweet. I means I have native WordPress template and styling control, and lots of tweakability.
Search is also fascinating as it represents 81% of how people get to CSS-Tricks. That’s particularly interesting in it means that the growth in page views wasn’t necessarily from search, as we had 86% of traffic from search last year, down a full 5%. Growth came from other areas so strongly it pushed down search.
All of social media combined is 2%. I’m always reminded this time of year how much time and energy we spend on social media, and how perhaps the smart move is refocusing some of that energy toward on-site content, as that is far better for helping more people. Not that I don’t enjoy social media. Surely we’ve gotten countless ideas for posts and content for those posts from social media participation.
An interesting uptick was in direct traffic. 9% of visits this year were direct, up from just 5% last year. And referral traffic at 7% up from 5%. Social media remained steady, so really we have more people coming directly to the site and more links from other sites to thank for the uptick in traffic.
Speaking of social media, we got @CSS on Twitter this year, and that’s been fun. I would have thought it would have increased the rate of growth for followers, but it doesn’t appear to.
Chart from SocialBlade. I imagine that downblip was some sort of Twitter spam purge.
We hardly do anything with Facebook, beyond making sure new content is posted there. That sometimes feels like a missed opportunity since there is more people there than any other social network on Earth. But it doesn’t seem particularly huge in developer communities as best I can tell. Not to mention Facebook is constantly revealed to be doing sketchy things, which steers me away from it personally.
We’ve had a remarkably consistent year of the CSS-Tricks Newsletter, publishing it every single week. Robin Rendle works hard on that every single week. We started the year with 31,376 subscribers and ended with 39,655. So about an 8.5k increase, down from the 10k increase last year. It’s still good growth, and I suspect we’ll see much better growth next year because the new site design does a lot better job promoting it and we have some plans to make our authoring of it and displaying it on this site much better.
If the news about Edge going Chromium made you worry that Chrome would become too dominant of a browser… well, Edge hasn’t actually done that yet and Chrome is already pretty darn dominant already, particularly on this site. 77% of traffic is Chrome, 11% Firefox, 6% Safari, about 1.5% each for IE and Edge, and then the rest sprinkled out through 836 other identified browsers.
61% Windows, 22% Mac, 7% Linux, 7% Android, 3% iOS, and the rest sprinkled through 42 known operating systems.
Traffic geography has remained consistent. The United States has the lead at 22%, India at 13%, UK at 5%, Germany at 4%, Canada, France, and Brazil at 3%, Russia, Australia, Netherlands, Spain, Poland, Italy, Ukraine, China, Philipines at 2%, and the rest over 240 other identified countries.
Another surprising turn this year was mobile traffic. Internet wide, I believe we’re past the tipping point of more than half of all traffic being from mobile devices. On this site, we hovered at just 2 or 3% for many years. It was 6% last year, a big jump, and now 10% this year. I always suspected the main reason for the low numbers was the fact that this site is used in conjuction with doing active development, and active development is still a desktop-dominant task. Still, it’s growing and the rate of growth is growing too.
There were 3,788 approved comments this year, down from 5,040 last year. We’ve been hand-approving all comments for a while now. We’ve always moderated, but having to approve them before they appear at all slows down commenting activity and leads to less overall. I’d estimate maybe 50-60% of non-spam comments get approved. Absolutely worth it to me to maintain a positive vibe here. I also suspect the main reason for lower comments is just that people do a lot more of their conversing over social media. I’m sure if we tracked conversations on social media in relation to things we’ve published (somehow) that would be up.
Our commenting system is also dreadfully old timey. I’d love to see a system that allows for accounts, comment editing, social login, a fancy editor, Markdown, the whole nine yards, but I’ve yet to be swooned by something.
The contact form on site is up to ID #21458, so we got 1,220 messages through that this year.
Goal Review
? Publish something in a new format. Behind the scenes, we actually did some foundational work to make this happen, so I’m optimistic for the possibilities. But we didn’t get anything out the door. The closest thing we’ve been doing is organizing content into guides, which is somewhat of a new format for us that I also want to evolve.
? More editorial vision. I think we got close enough to call this a success. We did a bunch of themed weeks. We were always grouping content together that is thematically related. Our link posts got better at being referential and topical. We still covered news pretty well. I think I’d like to see us to more far-ahead planning so we can bring bigger ideas to life.
? Interesting sponsorship partners. I think we nailed it here.
? Create another very popular page. We’re at our best when we’re creating really strong useful referential content. When we really nail it, we make pages that are very useful to people and it’s a win for everybody. I’m not sure we had a run-away super popular page this year, so we’ll gun for it next year.
New Goals
Polish this new design. This is easily the most time, effort, and money that’s gone into a redesign since the big v10 design. There are a lot of aesthetic changes, but there was also quite a bit of UX work, business goal orientation, workflow tweaking, and backend development work that went along with it. I’d like to get some mileage out of it by not just sitting on it but refining it over a longer period.
Improve newsletter publishing and display. We sent our newsletter out via MailChimp, which is a great product, but over the years it has been good to us to bring as much under the WordPress umbrella as we can. I think we can create a pretty sweet newsletter authoring experience right within WordPress, then continue to send it via MailChimp via a special RSS feed. That’ll take some work, but it should make for a better newsletter that is more comfortable to produce and easier to integrate here on the site.
Raise the bar on quality. I’d be happy see the number of posts we publish go down if we could make the quality go up. Nothing aginast any of our authors work that is already out there, but I think we all know super high quality articles when we see them and I’d like to hit that mark more often. If that means posts spending more time in editing and us being a bit more demanding about what we’d like to see, we’ll do it.
Better guides. There are two sorts of guides: “complete guides” like our flexbox and grid guides (to name a few) and “guide collections” which are hand-chosen, hand-ordered, and hand-maintained guides along a theme, like our beginner guide. As a site with loads of content from over a decade, I really like these as a way to make sure the best stuff has a proper home and we can serve groups of people and topics in a strong way.
Among the millions of apps across app stores of different platforms only a few enjoy financial stability and actually are run like a serious business.
A recent report by Gartner makes this known truth even more explicit for our knowledge. Only 1 percent of all the mobile apps are actually successful as far as business revenue and stability is concerned. This alarming fact may be disheartening enough for you but nevertheless, it can surely make you understand some serious factors concerning the success of mobile apps as a business.
Those days are gone when mobile apps used to be taken as lightly as a special endeavor. Now with staggering development cost and gruesome marketing maneuvers you just cannot afford to consider apps without a specific business and financial goal. While most apps remain unsuccessful and a select few get overwhelming success one can take this as a serious opportunity as well. There must be some sure and already time tested formulas that make some apps join this sleek lane of success and stability.
Let us decipher and analyze some ways that have the potential to make your app successful.
1. Platforms
These two are the foremost considerations for analyzing the factors related to the success of few apps and literally overwhelming failure of most apps. As a platform, iOS is still ahead in respect of greater presence of revenue earning apps followed by mobile browsers and Android respectively. Though among the first three, the gap is closing at rapid speed. Windows phone and Blackberry still offers a little scope for making apps survive on the revenue earned from these platforms alone. A cross platform development approach with focus on native and device specific user experience is still the winner compared to expensive native development or so called one-for-all cross platform development.
2. Distribution and marketing of apps
More than 99% apps lack a proper distribution and marketing strategy and as a result they just do not reach their target audience. If your audience just does not know your app how can they show interest in it, better still download it? You cannot get a million downloads overnight or within just a month. You need to work for it well in advance. Most apps do the mistake of undertaking marketing maneuvers at the time of launching the app and naturally after months of their launch they struggle to cut deeper in audience response. On the other hand, most successful apps run their marketing campaign with a goal to build up expectation from their target audience well before the launch date and so when the app is actually launched in app store it immediately gets considerable viewers and downloads. Press and media release gearing towards the app launch is a good marketing strategy. Creating content in social media, influential review blogs and guest posts is another strategy that garners huge success.
3. Categories of apps
Obviously, some broader categories of apps make far better business than others. Though you cannot always change your deliverable focus as per this factor it is worth considering for measuring the chances of various app categories. Enterprise apps, business and productivity apps enjoy the highest revenue followed by other categories. In the second tier health, fitness, communication, and social networking apps enjoy greater earning than other app categories. These first 4 or 5 categories together consist of the most successful and financially thriving apps across the app stores. With other positive factors boosting the chances of your app category cannot be a major concern, but still, some categories enjoy better revenue earning potential than others.
4. Engagement and retention
This obviously depends on how better you have distributed your app and garnered response from audience. Once your app slowly reaches certain level of downloads and user base getting feedback from users and engagement with them will further add more value to the app and help you retain your user base over a long time. There are some important factors to observe on a regular basis. For instance, pay attention to the number of people using your app on a regular basis and the percentage of users who after using the app a few times just did not open it for a long time. Remember, in app universe most apps that are not visited or used frequently run the risk of getting deleted and losing users. Getting the user attention on a continuous basis is the key to your success in retaining users and growth.
There are other important aspects to observe in this regard as well. With the Flurry Analytics tool, you can easily see the parts of your app that are used most. This type of analysis would further let you see the typical user behavior and the way they expect the app to get better or user friendly. If there is any scope of introducing a new feature or app content is lurking behind the surface it can be observed and analyzed with tools like this. In an ever changing mobile environment, the user preference cannot be static and naturally every time you have to look out for new scopes of developing the app to address emerging user needs and choices. This continuous feedback and engagement is the key to retain your existing users and expand the user base at rapid speed. This has been a persistent success factor for almost all the major successful apps till date and you cannot afford to ignore it.
5. In-app tactics that pay in the long run
If you have several apps under one roof, promoting each other in a contextual manner becomes easier. Otherwise partnering with well known apps with related niche can also pay you great result. To conclude we must refer to some successful in-app tactics that can help you build revenue or downloads in quicktime. Incorporating app discovery links within the app content and usage pattern is a great way to promote another app and garner downloads. For instance within an education app, you can easily create a user link to another student friendly productivity or notebook app. Utilizing and analyzing the user data you can further customized promotion of app for respective users.
Bottom Line
In spite of huge growth in the use of mobile apps for most apps the competition is continuing to get tougher every day. Naturally, without stringent and methodical focus on growth, retention and user preference an app does not stand a chance of getting enough revenue to sustain as a business. The above mentioned tactics decided upon the common success factors of major apps can help you take sure footed strides in app universe.
