Here are the latest updates for April-May!
• Re-categorized my blog posts for my small web subdomain. Everything is divided nicely by the day’s theme and should be easy to refer back to if people want to scroll through.
• Updated my social media “call to action” on my sidebar to say “Help Grow the Small Web on Social Media!” I think it sounds better than “Join us on Social Media” because the whole point of the marketing campaign is to help grow the Small Web on social media so more people can discover it. Anyways, it just makes more sense to me so I updated it.
• Just want to take a moment to thank everyone who’s contributed their lovely artwork to my Museum page. 🥰 It brightens my day every time I see a new submission. It took awhile to perfect that drawing tool and figure out how to set it up so people could save their artwork and submit it to the site. Eventually I would like to make it so there’s some sort of button people can press when they’re done to automatically submit it rather than having to save it first in order to submit it. I’ll tinker with it more one of these days.
• Took a small break from my marketing campaign. Admittedly, it is A LOT of work for one person to schedule 365 social media posts. I massively overestimated myself and underestimated how much work it would really be. But, I am still determined to finish it. Once I get a full year’s worth of posts done, I can start recycling them on a lot of platforms and my small web marketing campaign can just continuously market itself and continue to reach new people without the continuous grind of constantly creating new posts all the time. It’s a long term goal that I think will have a positive impact for the Small Web movement, and a short term sacrifice for myself in the grand scheme of things that’s for a great cause.
• Updated my Small Web front page a bit. Added buttons to the Social Media Micro Blog section so people can easily see all posts in a certain category. This will make things more easily shareable should anyone choose to.
• Did a lot of back end optimization. My site and subdomains should all run significantly faster now. Hopefully that resolves a lot of the lag issues!
• Started working more on my shop subdomain. Making a lot of progress on the visual aspects of it. I still need to get a few pages set up and then it’ll be time to start filling it with products (or wares, as it will align with the fantasy theme of my website and shop being part of a “realm”)! Truthfully, I’m not sure how well it will do. But it’s a fun creative outlet and I think it compliments my site, and it’s niche to this movement building personal websites. People can buy digital “items” that will give them cool interactive features for their sites. I’ll also have some tools so people can help flesh their sites out and even build up realms of their own if they choose to! It’s going to be really cool I think.
• Added a custom overlay to my Cottage subdomain. It has a fun little roleplay and visual novel style interactive system that allows people to get to know me a little bit. I might add more to it as time goes on but for now this is what I’m starting with. 🙂 Gradually I want to transform various parts of my site to have more of these interactive NPC elements. I’ve also been toying with the idea of adding Easter eggs throughout these interactions and giving out little rewards/trophies for finding them. I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to do that yet or what the rewards will be yet but I’ll sit on the idea a bit more.
• Finally got sick of the scanlines across my site so I’ve removed them. They were toggle-able but I’m honestly over it now. I think I might put them back come autumn as it makes for a good autumn aesthetic, but for right now I think I just like the cleaner look better.
• Started working on a Privacy Policy page which will be posted across my site at some point today. I felt like I should add it because I use WordPress, and built right into the CMS when people comment it logs IP info to help prevent spam. I also use a security plugin for my website that shows IP data, logs, and such so I can keep an eye on attack attempts. I also have a privacy respecting analytics plugin for my own curiosity to see what pages on my site people visit most, and generally where my traffic comes from. It doesn’t log IP data or anything, everything is anonymous and just for my own curiosity to know more about my site traffic. I’m also going to be integrating my WooCommerce store soon with my site, which will process transactions and payments. All of this combined, it just felt like a good time to implement a privacy policy on my site. No data is shared with any third parties other than for the functionality mentioned above, it all stays local to my server and is solely used for the purposes mentioned. I don’t share or sell any of it and never will, nor do I track people across the web. I care a lot about keeping my site as privacy respecting as possible while still providing the functionality I need and keeping it safe and secure. But people still deserve to know that there is minimal tracking on here for these functions, so I’ll be adding a privacy policy page to my primary domain as well as all of my subdomains.
That’s it for April-May’s updates! 🙂