CSS Slicing Guide
Blogged on April 25th, 2007 at 11:31amMy latest project that hasn’t got anything to do with clients or AvengeX is CSS Slicing Guide. It’s basically a site based around one tutorial: how to slice your Photoshop layout into CSS and XHTML.
The guide is aimed at newbie webmasters mostly, and so far the audience has received it quite well. I have learned a few things from the CSS gods in the publishing of the site and I’m working on making it better that way too. I’m not sure if I want to flog the site on Sitepoint or elsewhere after a few months, as I want to see how well it does in terms of advertising revenue first. Either way, I think it’s quite a good addition to a portfolio as a quick job, as the guide itself only took about 4 or 5 days to write on and off.
The design is simple small on the code size, and I hope this will give it a healthy advantage in the SEO department. The layout image is only 60kb and that’s it - the rest is done with text, allowing for the content to really be king in this scenario.
The backend is very simple and lightweight - naturally written in PHP. Dynamic titles using arrays, and then including the relevant stage with a mod_rewrite interface for URLs. All of the editing is done by me on Dreamweaver and not much is automated apart from that, but it works, and there’s no need for a user system or anything.
As for marketting.. this is where the challenge begins. I submitted it to Good-Tutorials, Digg and Slashdot yesterday, but it only made 12 Diggs so far, and only made it into the Firehose at Slashdot. As for Good-Tutorials, I’m not expecting anything promising from there since the moderators are pretty harsh guys. Considering the traffic for the first day, looking at 200 unique visitors wasn’t so bad. I’ve yet to get a decent idea of what the revenue will be like. I’m also considering investing on a little bit of advertising in the future, perhaps on AdWords or privately arranged advertising elsewhere. Not to mention it will be getting a link in the AvengeX newsletter in the next few days when I’ve written it. I’ve also submitted it to Pixel2Life, in the hope that Mr Dan Richard won’t get annoyed since I’m technically competing with him now.
The money spent on the project is something like £12, if you count all the domains and exclude the hosting. I hope to start to make a profit out of it in three months.
That’s about it for CSS Slicing Guide, when more news comes through I’ll be posting it here.
Edit! It’s currently way past the 400 Diggs mark on Digg.com, which is an amazing wow for me as it’s my first time anything I’ve posted has got so popular. Within the past 5 minutes it’s almost got past the 500 mark too!
If you’d like to contribute to the Digg effect, point yourself to the link below:
http://www.digg.com/design/Learn_to_professionally_slice_in_CSS_with_this_9_page_full_featured_guide
Edit 2: The Digg effect is setting in.. not too sure how well ikhost is handling the traffic spike but the site seems to be up for me still, and the Diggs are hitting the 800 mark now.
Edit 3: Dear God. We’re now past the 2200 Diggs mark and I am so chuffed! This will definitely help Google index it, and all the rest! I’ve decided this site will be a keeper, since I’ve got good feedback through email on the site and it makes me warm and fuzzy inside to get all the compliments and the feeling I actually help people. (I also guess $30 in a day is pretty good too, cheers Digg!)