A long post about a long journey to success-ville

It’s been about a year since I began working on Shufflingdead with true earnest, and I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on how far the site has come since then, and where I plan to take things in the future.

If you have a look at the Archives drop down to the right, you’ll see that updates in March and April of 2009 were pretty minimal; they began to increase in May and June before taking off in July. That output has yielded clear results; hits are up about 750% from a year ago.

Content volume can’t take all the credit, however, as sulci’s tireless work on the site’s layout has certainly helped. I’d roughly call Shufflingdead’s current form Version 13 (Version 12 being her initial redesign), and it’s about as professional, clean, and sleek as I can imagine it.

Now, to talk about the immediate future. You might have noticed Shufflingdead’s update schedule has been juggled around a little lately. Shameful Human of the Week is now Thursdays, Articles are Mondays, and from today forward, Neckbeard & Wolfshirt comics hit Sundays, with the podcast coming out on Tuesdays. My recent re-employment has meant that News updates have been a bit slower lately, and while I certainly feel doing one a day is mandatory, always hitting two a day isn’t. Doing fewer, larger updates is easier, more satisfying, and seems to net just as many, if not more, hits.

Since we’ll be done Cock Wars descriptions after tomorrow, next week’s Article will be my annual Summer To-Do List, which I’m very much looking forward to both writing and pursuing. I no longer have a drought of update ideas like I did last year, and so the list will be updated monthly, rather than weekly. In the next few weeks, I also plan to launch a third video series here on Shufflingdead, one which will hopefully take us up to two videos a week. More on that to come. I also want to get myself in the habit of writing more regular The Dungeon’s Boss updates.

“The New and Thrilling Shufflingdead.com” project, which roughly began with the implementation of WordPress, continues to chug along nicely. Here are the phases as they have been up to this point:

Phase 1: Finish porting site over to WordPress
Phase 2: Update at least minimally
Phase 3: Promote site
Phase 4: Expand the Shufflingdead empire
Phase 5: Increase quality
Phase 6: Rejuvenate Shufflingdead’s layout and organization
Phase 7: Increase user interactivity
Phase 8: Update EVEN MORE

Those have all been taken care of, and to great success. Now, to announce the next three phases of the plan:

Phase 9: Focus and explore Shufflingdead’s scope In the last few weeks, we’ve quietly slimmed down the site’s coverage to gaming, entertainment, and nerd culture. I’d like to explore the new possibilities created by no longer trying to cover everything in equal measure. The first step, I think, will be more specifically tagging old updates.

Phase 10: Really promote site We’ve gotten good at whoring Shufflingdead out on link sharing and social networking sites, but it’s time to really up the proverbial ante. I’m talking about serious community-building projects (not unlike our recent SDGR contest), small ad buys, content swaps, and whatever else it might take to keep the site’s readership growing.

Phase 11: Bring on a stable of contributors sulci’s kept busy video editing and handling the technical side of the site. She, and other Shufflingdead celebs, pop up in videos, or with the odd piece, but updating generally falls to me. It’s time to reach out to the Shufflingdead community, my social network, and even the internet more broadly, to bring on a more robust lineup of writers, comic artists, and anyone else I can find.

Let’s go.