4

Time flies! Perishable Press celebrates its fourth year online during this Fall season. Not really sure what that means at this point, other than a lot of hard work, plenty of great conversation, and a ton of design-related content. How did I get here? Let’s take a brisk stroll down memory lane..

During the site’s first year, I remember being too excited for my own good. WordPress was relatively new and I was completely inspired by the amazing things I could do with it. I spent most of my time building all sorts of different themes, studying web design, and posting useful code snippets. During this first year, Perishable Press was virtually unknown. Late night hours were spent drenched in CSS, (X)HTML, and PHP.

During the site’s second year, I delved deeper into web development, reading every blog, book, and comment I could get my hands on. I gobbled up knowledge like a hungry hungry hippo, and continued to post my discoveries and tricks. Some of the stuff I was posting began to assume more of a “tutorial” format, and this was back before tutorials were the highly refined gloss kits they are today. The site began getting a few links, and watched in amazement as my pages began to rank in the search engines. SEO was my new best friend, along with site optimization, usability, accessibility, and performance.

During the site’s third year, I continued sharpening my writing style, combining elaborate code descriptions with in-depth tutorials and comprehensive guides to a wide variety of development-related content. Traffic continued to increase, as did just about every other metric that I cared to look at. It was inspiring to know that people were reading, and that I was helping to give back to the incredible open-source design community from which I had learned so much. Site security became one of my primary concerns, and I continued to dive deep into the intoxicating pool of HTAccess and next generation blacklists.

During the site’s fourth year, I redesigned the site with an elaborate, psychedelic theme, and refined my content to include only the best material possible. Many of the shorter, quirkier posts were dropped in favor of more fully produced, well-researched articles on topics of broader interest than previously covered. Some awesome events happened during this most recent year, such as seeing my stupid htaccess tricks published in a book on Joomla Security, and working with Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks on a new WordPress book, Digging into WordPress.

During the site’s upcoming fifth year, I will be rethinking everything. Design. Content. Delivery. Everything. I definitely want to take things to the next level. My plans are vast and ambitious, and I feel as if I am just getting started with this site. There is much in store for the future — don’t miss it.