WPBeginner is 3 – A Look Back at the Past and a Glance at the Future

Dear WPBeginner Users,

If you are in the USA, I want to wish you a Happy 4th of July. This date is special to me because we publicly launched WPBeginner on this very day in 2009. I can’t believe that the 3 years have gone by so fast. I want to say Thank You to each and every single one of you for making it possible. I truly appreciate your comments, suggestions, tweets, facebook likes, re-pins, google +1s, and everything that you guys have done to support us. I can proudly say that we have the best audience. I have had the pleasure to enjoy the company of a lot of our users at various WordCamps and conferences. I enjoyed writing back to hundreds of thousands of emails and helping folks by answering their WordPress questions.

In this personal note, I wanted to look back at the past and share some of the most joyful moments of running WPBeginner. I also want to talk a little about the future of WPBeginner and what’s in the works.

What started in 2009 as a small website mostly for our clients now serves millions of pageviews per month helping hundreds of thousands of users. In the past three years, we have received a lot of press and mentions. We were mentioned in WIRED, WebMonkey (another WIRED property), Mashable, LinkedIn Official blog, Smashing Magazine, SitePoint, and countless other major websites. We have been mentioned by top social media users like Robert Scoble, Calvin Lee, Michael Hyatt, and many more. Aside from the mentions, we have gotten to work with or consult with companies like Webs Inc, CrazyEgg, Milo (now part of eBay), Flowtown, Mercer (Marsh & McLennan Inc), ZoneAlarm (CheckPoint), and many more.

We have written some really cool articles in the past. Below are some of my personal favorites:

• Behind the Scenes look of WPBeginner – The Blueprint
• Beginner’s Guide to Preventing Blog Content Scraping
• 15 Most Frequently Asked Questions by WordPress Beginners
• How to Increase Pageviews and Reduce Bounce Rate in WordPress
• What, Why, and How-To’s of Email Newsletter for your WordPress Blog
• Checklist: 15 Things You MUST DO Before Changing WordPress Themes
• How to Install WordPress on a Local Server Environment (in your Computer)
• WordPress Custom Fields 101: Tips, Tricks, and Hacks
• Default WordPress Generated CSS Cheat Sheet for Beginners
• How to Style Each WordPress Post Differently

Obviously those are just a few ones that I picked. You can see the full WPBeginner archives for more.

We started two new sections: Gallery and Coupons, only to shutdown one of them and rebrand the other. We shutdown the gallery because it was extremely hard to moderate and keep up with. We rebranded the coupons into DEALS which is available for everyone to use. The whole purpose of this rebranding was to add coupons and other time sensitive deals at one place. The name “coupon” restricted the section to only coupons. So we had to crowd our news section with a post for limited time deals.

Earlier last month, we launched a Videos Section. It contains 17 free videos that will help new users get started with WordPress. There are plans to add more “advanced” videos there (maybe even a full series tutorial on How to Design a WordPress theme).

I have always wanted to create freebies, but our time didn’t permit us to do so. I have created a landing page for WordPress and Blogging Freebies. The goal is to launch this section soon (which really means by the end of this year).

With this new redesign, we also created a WordPress Web Hosting Guide. Basically we get a lot of users asking us which web host they should sign up with. The goal with this section is to allow our users to post reviews about the hosting company that they are using. This will help new users make the right decision.

I’m working on a lot of comprehensive guides to add to our new Guides section. The idea behind this initiative is to have one place where users can get a step by step guide to working with WordPress. By the general nature of how blogs are organized, older content gets archived. However, some of our older articles are ever-green. This will allow us to keep those visible and make the user experience a lot better.

Once again, I want to thank every single one of you for reading and supporting WPBeginner through out these years. If you have any suggestions or want us to cover a specific topic, then simply tweet at us @wpbeginner or send us an email using our contact form.

Yours Truly,
Syed Balkhi
Founder of WPBeginner