While moving my blog posts over from Blogger to WordPress, I came face to face with a few old posts where I declared grand plans for my web sites. What became immediately obvious was how far off my predictions were. Everything was off. Although I exceeded my goals with DeepFitness, I fell far short with INeedCoffee. The CriticalMAS conversion went faster than expected. And as a result Digital Colony has suffered.
Where have I been wrong?
- INeedCoffee. Just a year ago I planned to start a new coffee web site to replace INeedCoffee. Then a few people talked some sense into me. INeedCoffee went commercial and everything changed.
- CriticalMAS. My plan was to keep this site on auto-pilot, but Blogger continued to get more and more buggy. Google’s unwillingness to fix Blogger for non-BlogSpot accounts drove me to redesign this site.
- DeepFitness. My goal was to have 800 XHTML compliant articles. Once I studied the traffic and how the site was making money that number was pushed up to 2300. The original goal was not sufficient.
- Digital Colony. The time spent on my other sites was taken from Digital Colony.
Along the way I did learn to not trust Alexa as a useful metric for site popularity. I’ve seen sites far more popular than mine with worse Alexa rankings. I no longer look at Alexa.
I hesitate to publicly state my web goals given my track record. Maybe it just takes time to get good at predicting? With that said, here are my immediate web goals.
- CriticalMAS. Finish moving all legacy photo galleries to SmugMug. This is time consuming since I need to locate the original photos. Moving eight years of content and handling redirects gracefully has been educational.
- INeedCoffee. Major redesign – both front-end and back-end. I owe it to my contributors to create a better showcase for their efforts.
That is it for now. I also have a brand new project in mind, but will not pursue it until these two immediate web goals are completed. I think. 
