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Smashing Highlights 2007
December 27th, 2007 in Best of the Month | 55 Comments
Although Smashing Magazine is quite young, a number of things happened in 2007. Aside from dozens of articles, we’ve organized few contests, re-designed our weblog and we also have released two WordPress-themes and a Smashing free font.
In this post we revise what happened on Smashing Magazine over the last year. Smashing highlights, setbacks and small sensations of 2007 — in a brief overview, month by month.
January
For us, the year began with a small traffic earthquake. The article 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without has managed to reach front pages of almost every social network; it was recommended by hundreds of bloggers and drawn a huge attention to the Smashing Magazine.
It’s not a secret that this post has become one of the typical posts to follow in 2007. Extremely long and with dozens and dozens of large images. In January we were quite generous about the size of our images. Now, 12 months later, we know better. Currently the post reached 759 comments and trackbacks.
February
With the growing popularity of WordPress also the interest for decent WordPress-themes grows. This not quite new idea brought us in February to 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen.
We’ve spent weeks selecting decent, professional and high-quality WordPress themes. It was worth it. Even although some readers complained that they actually seen these themes, at the moment the article has 849 comments and trackbacks.
March
A scandal in March — nobody wanted to read Google Gadgets, Widgets and Moduls, a well-researched article with many useful references. Apparently, we’ve got to have more images, as we did in the showcase Keep It Simple, Stupid!.
April
We’ve announced the winner of our logo contest. Ruan Deyzel from South Africa designed a Smashing logo we currently use — you can see it on the left at the top.
In April we’ve experimented with new concepts; in the article 35 Designers x 5 Questions we’ve gathered the opinions of 35 renowned experts across the globe. It wasn’t easy and took us much more time than we expected.
The result was an extremely long article with suggestions, ideas and tips from professional designers and developers. Questions: 1 aspect of design you give the highest priority to, 1 most useful CSS-technique you use very often, 1 font you very often use in your projects, 1 design-related book you highly recommend to read.
May
Since May we regularly present colorful collections with high-quality icons, graphics and templates. The first article of its kind, Freebies Round-Up: Icons, Buttons and Templates, has brought us 235 comments and trackbacks.
June
A quite unspectacular month. The most exciting article was probably (guess what!) a list of 80+ AJAX-Solutions For Professional Coding.
July
In July, in the article Wanted: Your 404 Error Pages, we’ve prompted our readers to design 404-error-pages and let us know about them. Few weeks later we’ve published the results in the article 404 Error Pages: Reloaded. We’ve received a friendly applause from our readers and the article was quickly forgotten. Weeks later thousands of Digg comrades passed by generating a huge traffic spike. After Digg’s front page the article found its path to other social networks. In the end, it was much more successful than we expected.
In comments Digg users complained about a “not-that-accurate” selection of the best 404-pages. The truth is, it wasn’t supposed to be the ultimate Best-Of collection; it was just a collection of creative ideas provided by excellent readers of a small weblog.
The most colorful, but not quite popular article of the month was Exploring Design: Outstanding Start Pages. We love large images, you know.
August
In August we’ve published one of the most beautiful articles we’ve ever written — Data Visualization: Modern Approaches was very well linked, cited and praised.
The typography-lovers could celebrate their passion in the article 80 Beautiful Typefaces For Professional Design.
September
In September we’ve celebrated our One-Year-Anniversary and therefore smashed our readers big time, one week long. We’ve organized two give-aways and offered our readers over hundred presents — books, accounts, tools and services. These posts had 2101 and 1855 comments and trackbacks, accordingly.
October
Screensavers - Best Of was the most colorful and popular article of the month, for the whole family, not only for designers and developers.
November
The November had a little surprise for us. The post User Experience Of The Future, actually a tiny creativity portion for monday inspiration, with only 12 images (nothing compared to our previous posts), was linked so often and so quickly that our web-hoster was fed up with the amount of traffic the article generated. Consequently the december has brought us a lot of problems.
December
The worst month of the year. Our lovely Webhoster Manitu throttled down our server, wasn’t cooperative, lied to us and finally thrown us away. The result was We Experience Serious Server Problems. We’ve received many suggestions and offers. Not everyone knows that a project like Smashing Magazine can’t be hosted on “usual” Webspace or on a Managed Server. We need more. And terabytes of traffic are also quite costly. However, now we are finally back on track and run on a new server (more information in January).
Why Smashing Highlights?
Why would someone write an article like this? What are the benefits and why are such revisions useful? Yaro Starak knows why and provides answers in his article What Did Blogging Teach You In 2007?
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Rob Hawkes (December 27th, 2007, 3:21 am)
It’s nice seeing this blog progress since it started, 2007 was a great year. Keep it up!
Chris Vincent (December 27th, 2007, 3:46 am)
The Images that have coupled the best posts have really helped me jog back my memory for these posts. Thankyou!!!
Nathan (December 27th, 2007, 3:53 am)
Great stuff. A couple weeks ago I decided to simplify my life 43folders-style and unsubscribed to about 95% of the feeds in my Reader. The goal was to keep a handful (10 in this case) of feeds that actually provided continuously useful information. Smashing was one of just a few that I didn’t even have to think twice about - I NEED you guys. Keep up the good work!
Aaron (December 27th, 2007, 4:25 am)
Mmmmm…. twas a great year, wasn’t it?
Maurice Snip (December 27th, 2007, 4:36 am)
Nice overview of 2007!
I really enjoyed reading the articles, they all attracted me in some kind of way. I guess we have a lot of interrests in common. Anyway, keep the great articles coming. See you guys next year!
Simon (December 27th, 2007, 4:42 am)
Great Year, Great Posts!
Just go on like this! It’s always nice to visit SmashingMagazine….
Happy new year 2008; with excellent posts and beautiful designs!
Gonzalo (December 27th, 2007, 7:18 am)
This was a great year, thank you very much for all this Smashing Magazine, we love you!
Darwin Santos (December 27th, 2007, 7:57 am)
amazing!!!
I honestly thought that the smashing magazine was at least 4 years old, judging by the quality of the articles and the web design techniques presented in each one, I am awed to see that you guys are only a year old. Great Job, the best we design magazine I’ve seen so far ( and the only one I constantly visit). Keep the Good Work.
Darwin Santos
La Vega, Dominican Republic.
Gelay (December 27th, 2007, 12:09 pm)
Enjoyed visiting SMASHING MAGAZINE in 2007. Keep up the good job. Looking forward to exciting stuff from you in 2008. Many thanks.
gdiaz (December 27th, 2007, 12:10 pm)
I still remember that CSS technique article as if it was yesterday. I enjoy the all the posts here and have made SmashingMagazine a regular on my rounds of sites to check regularly.
Congrats, best wishes for the New Year!
Raj (December 27th, 2007, 12:41 pm)
For somebody who’s just started reading Smashing recently, this highlight post is pretty helpful. I don’t need to dig the archives for the best posts now :D
Photoshop Tutorials (December 27th, 2007, 2:44 pm)
I became a fan of Smashing magazine after reading
Link [www.smashingmagazine.com]
Then CSS technique article came in to being, since then I keep checking SM regularly, Thank you smashing magazine for combining so great information on a single site.
And very right said gdiaz, It all seems like yesterday. CSS techniques, 83 Beautiful Wordpress, logo contest, Creative Favicons. Thats was a real smashing year for smashing magazine.
Digital Revolutions (December 27th, 2007, 3:04 pm)
Nice article, some great highlights. Thanks Smashing! I’ll be definitely checking out your magazine more often!
Luc (December 27th, 2007, 3:12 pm)
Have another gr8 year!
I’m impressed by the high quality of the articles which are provided for FREE!
dharma (December 27th, 2007, 3:16 pm)
wow, that was a nice ride down the memory line. Some of those articles are so fresh in my mind. Thank you smashing magazine and wishing you a rocking smashing 2008!
Chris (December 27th, 2007, 3:53 pm)
I happy to tell you that Smashing Magazine has been my browser home page for close to a year now. Surely a record for me, ha ha. Keep up the great work.
Creativ Era's (December 27th, 2007, 5:41 pm)
Such a nice overview of the entire year main article and work done by smashing magazine. It was a great work and giving an overview will definitely help the new readers. Keep it up great work.
AeM (December 27th, 2007, 5:58 pm)
always cool magazine :)
btw, i still haven’t received the total commander license from september’s anniversary’s giveway, could you please see this ?
thanks :)
tite (December 27th, 2007, 6:58 pm)
Yeah Thanks for the Existence !!
i’ve met you fo about half year
and i’m really addicted to your tips and new ideas that you bring to us!!
Have a Good 2008 SM Team ;)
Keep up the Good Work
DraStik (December 27th, 2007, 7:49 pm)
Been visiting your site almost every working day this year.
Thank you for all the amazing stuff you presented us here.
All the best in new 2008.
Best wishes from Belgrade, Serbia :)
therapix (December 27th, 2007, 8:50 pm)
Happy New Year!
Let’s hope you bring some merchandising soon!
Keep up the good work!
Raj from BlogHash.com (December 27th, 2007, 9:11 pm)
Keep up the good work. We expect much more than what you have delivered so far this year. Yours is the only blog of which I have read each and every post and found them useful to me.
New year wishes to all of you and your readers, good luck!
Jason (December 27th, 2007, 10:07 pm)
Smashing Magazine is the best. I bookmark each almost every post and remember each one of these great posts. Keep it up next year!!!
Jason (December 27th, 2007, 10:10 pm)
Smashing Magazine is awesome. I remember each one of these posts. Actually I have the majority of these bookmarked. Each post is so relevant and filled full of useful tips and tricks. Keep it up next year!
That Single Guy (December 27th, 2007, 10:36 pm)
Keep up the great work!
Noelt (December 27th, 2007, 11:18 pm)
Congratulations on publishing such a fantastic magazine and providing valuable information, insights and ideas. Looking forward to more in 2008.
Venkat Ganjipally (December 28th, 2007, 1:57 am)
It’s “smashing” the Web UI stuff! Congratulations to Smashing Magazine.
Thanks for all your help to learn News things in UI.
webguru (December 28th, 2007, 12:14 pm)
Dear Smashers!
You become a really important institution.
Keep up your good work. The world needs people like you!
Thx!
Viran Anuradha (December 28th, 2007, 9:14 pm)
Great Year, Great Posts!
rebelde (December 29th, 2007, 1:38 am)
Smashing magazine is the best! My favorite place to look for new ideas for design. Keep on with the great work!
Danielle (December 29th, 2007, 6:14 am)
For shame! The image that goes along with this post on the front page has a blank width attribute, followed by the correct one after the src attribute. In FF, this is rendering fine, but in IE (6 & 7, at least) it’s displaying with only one pixel. Clean up your code, Smashing!
And what about a tabindex for the “Submit comment” button? The user can’t just tab from the textarea to the submit button; they must either use the mouse or tab back up and hit enter from a text field.
Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz (December 29th, 2007, 6:41 am)
@Danielle: thank you, both issues are solved now.
Malcolm (December 30th, 2007, 2:24 am)
Hmmmmm.. wonderful year wasn’t it.. Keep it up for the next year too :)
Matrich (December 31st, 2007, 11:49 pm)
Thanks so much for this compilation. Smashing Magazine has been such a great resource and we are hoping for much more in the coming year 2008
Alex (January 1st, 2008, 7:39 am)
Tons of good stuff in here, thanks for putting this all together!
Shane (January 2nd, 2008, 2:22 am)
Thanks for a great year - your site is quite possibly the first I visit for the latest web-related news and techniques.
All the best for 2008!
macromediax (January 2nd, 2008, 3:04 am)
Really great . specially the designed temps . I wannaa use them for my blog .
meyabilisim (January 2nd, 2008, 9:35 am)
All the best for 2008!
Robin (January 2nd, 2008, 10:31 am)
Hey guys, really a smashing good job! All the best for 2008 and keep up the great work! You are my daily inspiration!
Ridikul (January 4th, 2008, 7:46 pm)
Vitaly is God.
Alex Mos (January 6th, 2008, 5:14 pm)
I always find something interesting to read here… Happy New Year and good luck in 2008
Dragon (January 7th, 2008, 6:22 am)
You guys should have an article about “Top resource websites professionals peruse”, or something to that effect.
Yours would be at the top of course. :?)
datapoints (January 11th, 2008, 12:13 am)
Quality over quantity for this year would be greatly appreciated!!!
Danielle (January 15th, 2008, 1:56 pm)
@Vitaly and Sven - that was fast, and fantastic. I appreciate the effort in making your site more usable. :)
Reginald (February 27th, 2008, 10:29 am)
There are so many things I found interesting in this post. I especially liked the screen saver. You may be a young magazine but your content is compelling.