I’m back from a visit to the first Bulk Barn to open in Quebec and I am back home with roughly 30 pounds of sugar and gelatin based products, with roughly 10% of that already coursing through my veins… and what do I love to do when I’m jacked on 3 pounds of sugar? WATERSKI of course! But seeing as it’s -30c outside, we’ll just have to go with posting a new v5 update! After all, I did promise to get down to business, so lets get biddy wit it!

I have a few items I would like to cover tonight, and in between these points I want to address comments that you guys posted on the first v5 blog posting. Thanks guys for taking the time to post your comments and feedback, I hope you continue to share your ideas and welcome more questions and comments both pre and post release.

Newsletter Update

The current newsletter is a dead duck… a moldy one.. a moldy dead duck that’s been lit on fire, run over and thrown in to a very, very deep hole. And then cement was poured over the hole and a very large building was erected over said hole, never to be revealed again. Needless to say the newsletter was not anywhere near what I wanted it to be, so the current incarnation of this feature is not being pursued at all. For whatever reason, the current newsletter’s readership is somewhere just over 13,000 subscribers… and when I send out a newsletter, I usually get a staggering ZERO responses to it and overall conversion on both P2L and advertised products was virtually non-existent. Why you ask? Well, apparently 12,000 zombies subscribed to the newsletter and don’t actually read it due to rotting eyeballs and the other 1000 are junked automatically by Hotmail’s fabulous spam filters that we can not be white-listed on.

Are you seeing what sugar does to me yet?

So we are going to revamp the newsletter system with a new authoring system, sign up system and a visually more appealing newsletter in your inbox. I am also going to completely nuke the readership database and start everything over from scratch. We’ll be changing to a double opt-in system so the non-readers and spoofed emails will be automatically removed and hopefully those that sign up ensure they white-list us on Hotmail, MSN and all the other places that delete our emails due to the volume of emails our server sends out. This means that once the new version goes out, you will need to RE-SIGN UP for the newsletter, which you can do with the sexy new sign up form or you can enable right in your account settings:

Told you I would start to show more screenshots! OK granted, small, hard to read screenshots…

FORUMS

Ah… the forums. We all love to hate the forums and you can tell by both the comments on my last post here as well as the feedback left on the forum itself, it is impossible to make everyone happy and we get completely opposite ideas on a weekly basis. We need less sections, we need more sections, we need better moderation and should be more strict, our mods are too strict, we need to reorganize, don’t touch the forums they’re great, the forums are devil spawn, the forums are touched by the kiss of God, you suck, you’re awesome etc. And seriously, aside from the kiss of God part, all that stuff is real feedback we’ve received. So let me address a few things I intend to change or add, but of course this list may (read: WILL) change as we get closer:

1. The entire area for posting tutorials will be removed and people will be asked to use the Publishing System for posting their tutorials. Right now people are posting tutorials in the forums AND in the Publishing area, and this doesn’t make an sense. Not only that, but the tutorials posted in the forums are not even being included in our index. PLUS I should also mention we’ll make it worth your while to use the Publishing System instead of the forums.

2. The tutorial request area will be expanded upon… I think the idea of having an area where people can post tutorials they would like to see if a great idea for webmasters that are constantly asking “What should I write about? All the good tutorials are already done!”. I honestly think everyone would benefit if this area was developed and supported a bit better.

3. affenmunkEY is going to have a cow if I don’t address the questions and comments about the graphic services and all that good stuff. This too will be moved away from the forums and become part of our MarketPlace area. All the sales areas for services, websites and such will all be moved to our MarketPlace as well as a bunch of new categories we think are relevant to the community (feel free to share your ideas). There will also be an area for volunteering and free work etc. Please see further down for more details on MarketPlace.

In terms of getting feedback on designs and such that you post, I can’t force people to post… make it interesting and I’m sure people will post feedback if they want to. We really need to focus on what our site is about, and that’s tutorials. Obviously critiquing and feedback go hand in hand with learning and tutorials, but there is no real way for me to force people to post on the forums… you have to be careful how this is handled because forum posting incentives tends to lead in to spam. I’d rather have no feedback than lemmings all passing through posting “Great Job” *click* Neeeeext.

Honestly though, I believe with the increased community involvement and forum exposure that you will find more people posting in all areas of the site. At least, that’s what we’re aiming for!

4. In terms of adding new areas, I don’t believe there are any new areas that need to be added… actually I think further diluting the posting members would only make matters worse. But I am open to suggestions for new areas on the forums, so feel free to suggest.

5. You will be able to jump to a specific tutorial category directly from the forum without having to go to the main page first via a jump menu in the forum header… sneaky peaky below:

That’s about all I want to touch on for the forums for now, but again, if you want to suggest a new area we should add please do by leaving a comment right here on the blog.

MARKETPLACE

To help support P2L and to fund cool prizes (you’re going to see TONS of cool loot up for grabs on the site on a consistent basis), we will be setting up a well organized MarketPlace for pretty much all sales and professional services our users want to offer or buy. All users will be able to post items in the Market Place for a small fee (think $1.95 small) and you will be able to post ads for the following:

1. Websites for sale
2. Domains for sale
3. Templates for sale
4. Design or programming services
5. Freelance jobs
6. Looking for volunteer work
7. Selling miscellaneous items
8. Link exchanges and advertising offers
9. Web hosting
10. and more!

This area won’t be ready for the release however, but it will be the first site update to v5 after the initial release… basically we’re going to release v5 and while we fix bugs and the inevitable issues that crop up with a new release, we’ll be attacking the marketplace for release. We hope that you guys will appreciate a nice organized place to advertise or purchase items and services for a very minimal expense, and depending on it’s success will be a big factor on how much advertising we need to put on the site to fund operations. The more money we can generate with our internal services like the MarketPlace and our Ad System, the less network ads we need to ram down your throats at every turn. Believe me, it would be AWESOME if our internal systems negated the need for external ad networks completely, how cool would THAT be?

I should also mention that active members will be able to purchase MarketPlace placements without having to pay any monetary fees… and you will see why fairly soon! So that’s my little introduction to the MarketPlace for now, we’ll have more on that guy in the near future.

IRC

A P2L Chat room that integrates with the forums is a distinct possibility on the new version… we shall see. I’m hesitant because chats tend to be like a shiny new toy that is fun to play with for a week or two and then gets forgotten about once the novelty has worn off. Maybe you guys can convince me otherwise!

That’s it for me tonight guys, need to run down and get me some more gummi bears! Please be sure to click the comment button below and leave me your feedback/suggestions/comments and we’ll see you on the next update!

Thanks,
Dan

Hello everyone! With v5 development coming close to it’s 1 year finish line (a year already?! How did THAT happen??) I think it’s time we started filling everyone in on what’s been going on, what’s coming up, and to get some user input as we start to put on the finishing touches and polish the chrome. So today my blog is the official v5 update information center for anyone looking for the latest news on the release of the latest version of Pixel2life.com and it’s continued development post release.

Just so [cliches] everyone is on the same playing field and all the cards are down [/cliches] I have obviously noticed the slow down in community involvement on P2L and obviously the lack of participation on the forums compared to a couple of years ago as have many community members have noticed themselves. While tutorial submissions are as high as ever, it seems like overall participation of the traffic is lower and I am looking to address this and bolster the overall traffic and coverage the site receives. Basically this update has two primary goals from my point of view:

1. Increase traffic and user/community participation

2. Increase revenue

Increase Revenue:

Now, before everyone starts screaming about my corporate greed and my blood-lust for money and power and all other worldly possessions, I would like to give everyone a little dose of reality. I have seen people complain about the ads on P2L, complain that I already make a TON of money (apparently I swim and sleep in an in-ground pool filled to the brim with greenbacks), so let me tell you… I WISH! The fact is P2L makes very little money, and this past year has been especially bad with revenues NOT MAKING ENOUGH TO EVEN PAY FOR THE SERVER! That’s right… the server that P2L runs on costs $434 a month, and my last check from Tribal-Fusion was $300 and change. Pixel2life is in fact my FULLTIME job, but obviously with the piss-poor revenue I have had to focus on other things to pay my bills as it’s a tad hard to live on $300 a month. Some months are obviously better when advertising is purchased through the site, but it’s still nothing near what it needs to be to justify committing full-time hours to this project any more.

So how do I plan to address this? More ads? Pop-ups? Bank Robberies? None of the above (well… side)! In fact, we’re going to be going with less ads, especially at launch and I have been looking very hard in to alternative ways of monetizing the site OTHER than hammering people with banner/google ads. Combining these new ideas along with a minimal amount of traditional advertising with solid increases in revenue should turn things around effectively. To tell you the truth, it had better or you might find P2L for sale over at Sitepoint lol! I am no marketing guru and have to admit I know very little in the way of raking in ad money from a site, but I’ve been studying very hard the last few months and have found a number of effective methods that I think will be acceptable to everyone. Not only that, but we are putting together something for our community where YOU will be rewarded for helping us generate revenue and assuring our continued survival. I know it’s a little cryptic at the moment, but it will all be clear in the coming weeks. I am of course always open to ideas on generating revenue, so if you have some tips other than the obvious, please let me know.

But, I can tell you the following in regards to our earning efforts:

- We will NOT be increasing the amount of ads per page in the new version… in fact it will be less in many areas such as the main page and category pages.
- We will NOT employ the use of pop-ups for revenue purposes
- We will be drastically REDUCING the costs of purchasing advertising through our in-house advertising system. For example, all PPC purchases will be a flat rate of 5 cents a click for any campaign size.
- Participating community members will have the opportunity to try our advertising system for FREE with no commitment of making a purchase, no CC information etc. FREE = FREE

Increase traffic and user/community participation:

Due to the waning income and participation on the site, my interest in the project has dropped just short of me packing up shop and moving on to bigger things. The huge delay in releasing v5 hasn’t helped matters and up to now, and you very rarely saw a forum post, news entry or blog post from me… I just haven’t been in to it. I want everyone to know that as we near completion and I get more involved in the daily process with Nick, I am getting more and more excited about this and that I am fully committed to making this the biggest and best release of P2L. I am gearing up for the hard work and campaigning I used to do that got us in to magazine articles, TV show mentions and many other forms of media. I am going to go out there and sell our brand, get us badass prizes and get involved with the community that has made us so successful in the last 5 years. The more I started to think about closing up shop, the more I wanted this refresh, this evolution of the site to be completed so we can show the rest of the tutorial community why we are the best and will always be the best tutorial portal for graphic artists and programmers. P2L has a KICKASS fan base and dedicated staff, it would be stupid to give all that up when you all deserve more than that.

Bottom line here is that I am going all out on this release and the months ahead and you will be seeing my ol’ face a HECK of a lot more than you’ve grown used to in the last year.

We are also working on some exciting new ways of getting the members involved in the community, be it the forums or the tutorials themselves. A brand new reward system will be in place, where you can earn the opportunity to advertise your site with us or take home some awesome loot just for being active on the site! We’re going to be bringing in some hilarious content and goodies of our own for you guys to check out and overall I think you’re going to find the site is “fun” again, rather than a simple list of tutorials with no face attached to it all.

Version 5 is without a doubt our biggest undertaking yet here at P2L and I hope you will join fellow P2L members and keep up to date with the blog updates and I urge you not to hesitate to post any of your comments below by pressing the comment button and using the form to share your thoughts. In fact, if you have any last minute ideas for the site, please go ahead and start sharing them RIGHT NOW, it’s not too late to have them added to the site or to the queue of additional upgrades we want to add to the site after release.

I plan to have news and updates for you guys every few days, so be sure to check back here a couple times a week or grab our RSS Feed.

Thanks!
Dan

Hey guys… well it's become apparent that any and all expected release dates have been blown to hell and we're still months away from release as far as I can tell. It sucks because the new stuff is just too cool for words, but people are busy with school and other projects so going has been very slow. Nick is doing what he can and it's looking great, but we definitely need more time.

So while we continue to work on v5, I thought maybe we could have some contests and give out some prizes I had planned to give out with the v5 release. I can worry about new v5 prizes later, for now I'd like to have some fun. So this week I'm going to come up with a little fun contest we can all participate in… I want you to post a picture in this thread of you wearing your halloween costume OR of your halloween pumpkin carving! It's that easy… After Halloween I will randomely select 1 winner and they get a cool little iPod Shuffle decked out in P2L green!

So post your photos and good luck everyone!

For those of you reading this on my Blog, you can find the contest thread HERE!

Dan

It’s been a long summer, filled with fairly crappy weather, Spongebob Squarepants and several hundred yards of Bounty paper towels. And if there’s anything I learned this summer, it’s that toilet training a puppy when it’s constantly raining is a HUGE pain in the ass! But it seems with back to school coming up next week, summer finally decided to start about a week ago. It’s honestly been the worst summer I have ever seen in this city weather-wise, I can not believe how much rain we’ve had. But now that August and September are here, so is ragweed, so now my sinus ass-kicking has begun.

My stay-at-home summer duties are almost up and Rosebud doesn’t need to pee every 35 minutes, so it finally means I can start catching up and stepping up the efforts on Pixel2life v5 and the community’s overall development. Not sure if anyone has noticed, but P2L was recently awarded a PR7 from Google on the last update. No idea how long that will last, but… GO US! Nick is back in school but still working hard on the site. At this point I would say we are 75% – 80% done, so it’s getting there.

In between work, I am also working with our NAID puppy on training and she has been doing VERY well. Here she is at 5 months old, taken today:

We started obedience training about 3 weeks ago and she has picked up basic commands EXTREMELY well, I am totally impressed. She seems to be able to grasp and accept commands immediately… As an example, she went from never hearing the lie down command to doing it on command anytime while walking (You can literally go Up, Down, Up, Down.. and she will keep standing and laying down) in 3 days. And she does this with minimal praise, I don’t even bother with food anymore. So I am extremely proud of her and I can’t wait for this winter to start Skijoring with her. We’ve been training with the harness too and she LOVES to pull! We haven’t had much training time though, I’ve been busy with P2L plus the crappy weather makes it hard to go out and pull in the muck.

So that’s about it from my end… all is well, just trying to hang in there until we get v5 out the door. I’m also happy to report we are back to the 5 – 7 day tutorial queue time on P2L, rather than the 2 weeks+ we had going all summer long.

That’s it for me guys and gals, take care and good luck to you students in your new school year!

Dan

Spring is in the air, and what better way to spend the rain soaked, mosquito infested, manure scented days of spring than working on the head-splitting task of updating Pixel2life? Actually, I think jamming a hot poker in my eye socket would be less painful to be honest, but I think it’s time for a change. A BIG change. I’ve been very busy in my personal life and actually spending less time on the PC and I’ve also been working on my little import business, which is thriving quite well. In a twist of fate, P2L went from my only real sustaining source of income and fulltime employment to a side hobby that actually costs more to run than it makes. To put it bluntly, I’m bored with P2L and it has become increasingly difficult to justify keeping it as part of my life, and I think it’s probably showing.

So once you come to realize that something you BUSTED YOUR ASS to bring to life has become nothing more than a tedious chore to you, it’s time to make some decisions. In my case, giving up is pretty much non-existent in my vocabulary, and with P2L drawing thirty thousands visitors a day, it’s hardly a site worth trashing. So I sat down and thought long and hard about what to do, and I came to the decision that it was time to create one last version to see if it could re-stimulate my interest and get me back to my P2L roots. But this can’t just be another upgrade to something a bit different or add a few new goodies like was done for v2 to v3 and v3 to v4… this needed to be major, something along the lines of v1 to v2, which was a total and complete ground-breaking change for us.

The first thing I knew we needed was a new layout, no question. Not a layout based on what we’ve been using since v2, we needed something totally new. So I started talking to all kinds of design sites… I contacted high-end studios like 2Advanced, I spoke to freelance designers and I went to smaller design places. I felt that in order to get away from the stagnant design, I needed someone ELSE to design the layout… some fresh eyes and hands to get some perspective on the new direction P2L needed to take. Much to my disappointment, people either didn’t want to work, wanted retarded amounts of money for a single PSD layout or simply submitted designs that were so God awful that I covered my ears and ran screaming for my life. Even Nick (NGPixel) handed over a design that wasn’t bad, but I still wasn’t “feeling it dawg”.

All the while, I had to work out a way of making P2L different… obviously we’re still going to be the huge tutorial portal that we’ve always been, kicking the crap out of the competition and all that good stuff, but that’s secondary now. I needed it to be new to ME, and in a world where the general feeling is that it’s all been done, that’s no easy task. I want the experience of using P2L to be different, and I want people to love using the site while still finding the tutorials they want. I also want to give members a reason to be members, and have fun performing a variety of tasks on the site. That’s when the light-bulb went off and some plans started to take shape… I talked with Nick, Jamie and Donna and shared some of the ideas I had cooking in the oven and they all seemed to think it had some serious possibilities. Then Nick came up with a boatload of other cool goodies he wanted to include, and some of them would be a BLAST to do, and that definitely had my undivided attention.

So now we had our direction, we just needed a layout… I was then forced to take matters in to my own hands. I decided to clear my head and not even look at the old designs, and I roughed in something I thought would look cool. I worked on it for a couple of hours and this basic outline I had put together looked… well.. pretty darn cool! I sent it in to Nick to flesh it all out and add the details, and he absolutely RAN with it and knocked my socks off with the extras he added on to it. Yes ladies and gents, we had our layout, and Nick is da fuggin man!

So fast forward to now, and development has been going on for several weeks now and it’s really starting to take shape. Nick is working constantly on the coding for now and Jaime and Adam will be brought on later to work on their respective parts plus I’ve hired some extra talented folks to help with the additional media we’ll need for the site. Overall I think you guys are going to LOVE this new site and while I’m sure there will be the usual moaning and groaning from the haters of change, the vast majority will be too busy having fun with the new goodies. This will be a massive change in two ways… visually the new site is stunning (I think anyhow) and second, the new member related services (sorry, it’s hard to describe anything that we’re doing without it becoming fairly obvious what we’re talking about).

I can honestly say that this is the most excited I have ever been about a new release and I can not wait to get back in to working on P2L and being super active with the community again! I spoke to Nick this afternoon and we sort of passed around a July release, so at the moment that is our target release date.

So thanks again everyone for your tremendous support throughout the years and I can not wait to welcome you to Pixel2life Version 5 this summer!

Dan