We've gone through our site's history, original idea, background, etc in our past "birthday news", so there's nothing new in that for our regular users (but for those of you, who are still interested, take a look at our last year's article). When I began writing this article I realized that our sixth year was the first year ever that we haven't launched any new major site sections, new site layouts, or anything "dramatic" like that. Rather, it has been a "year of evolution", rather than "year of revolution" for us as a website.
During the last year we've managed to focus on things that are less obvious to our average user, but make our site perform better and our site to grow faster. We spent several months during last winter on upgrading our whole server cluster and switching our site to use a new application server platform. There were times during the December and January when our site was as reliable as a Soviet-era technical gizmo, but all those problems went away after we finally managed to get all the pieces in the server puzzle together in March. Since that, we haven't had a single blackout on our site. Additionally, I've spend quite a lot of time improving our site's user experience -- fixing those little things you never really notice until they start to annoy you :-)
I would like to thank our new news team members -- Dela has been a tremendous help on our English news and guide sections, while Ankle has done similarly amazing job on our Finnish site. And yes, we have grown during the year as a site. We've grown from last June's 12 million page impressions/month to our current level of 20 million page impressions/month. So, you might say that a 75 percent growth in terms of page impressions in a year is quite good :-)
Last but not the least, I would like to thank all of my fellow admins, all of our hard-working moderators and especially you, our dear users. Without you guys, our site wouldn't be what it is today -- one of the largest digital multimedia sites in the world. Thank You!
Anyway, its time for our team of admins to practice the age-old tradition of Finnish beer drinking..
On behalf of AfterDawn Ltd,
-Petteri Pyyny, webmaster
Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 10 Jun 2005 3:25
