HAPPY NEW YEAR AND BEST WISHES FOR 2022!
Happy New Year to you and I hope you get to achieve your goals. Because a new year, means there are new opportunities ahead of us. But before I dive into my goals for this year I want to quickly recap 2021.
2021 Recap
My life has been very busy, it got to the point that I took unpaid leave so I can be there for my family. So instead of working 5 days a week, I’m only 4 days at the bakery. This arrangement has been in effect for 6 months now and will continue for another year. This has allowed me to take care of my loved ones.
Juggling all the facets of my life has been challenging from time to time. Despite that, I love working on my website in my spare time. I’m proud of what I have accomplished and that people consuming the content.
Holland is in another lockdown at the moment because of COVID, however, that doesn’t change the fact that I have to go to a big facility to bake bread. Luckily, no COVID for me in 2021.
I’m glad I could help out with both Borderlands Hunt Events and assist 2K with Maurice’s Community Carnage. In the background, I also helped some fellow content creators level up.
Website Growth
2021 has been an excellent year for the website. Somehow, the traffic has almost doubled compared to 2020. I added 431 articles to the site last year, which basically means if I spread it out, you have daily content. However, some days I don’t have time, and other days I manage to do several things.
I was surprised that we broke the 1 million views per month barrier last year. In August it even reached 1.5M views, which is insane.
In 2021 the site started out with 25M total views across its lifespan. I thought we would be able to reach the 35M views if things pan out. Season Pass 2 for Borderlands 3 wasn’t looking all that wild. So, I thought I would experience a dip, however, we hit 39M by the end of the year!
Upgrades
I purchased some new premium plugins for the site in 2021 to make things run smoother. Not just for you but also for me. This lets me create more content for you and offer a good user experience.
Another thing I added to my site is a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This allows you to access my site quicker via a local server.
A new video player lets me lazyload Youtube videos. Usually, when you embed a Youtube video you have to load 2 websites. The first is the site where the video is embedded and the 2nd is Youtube as you also need their CSS & Javascript files. By lazy loading the video, you only download the thumbnail during the initial load. Only when you hit the play button, do the video files get accessed.
Goals For 2022
- Improve the site
- This is always an ongoing thing. I always think I can do better. While I sometimes need to find the time, there is still a lot that I want to add or upgrade. I had a potential re-design up on my task list last year. I did check out the new theme from the creator of this theme, however, it wasn’t for me, and scrapped that from the list.
- Membership site
- I said this last year and I still want to provide additional value through a membership site. I tried building it several times last year, however, the first version didn’t live up to my quality standards. The second version worked on my small test site but when trying to implement it here on the main site, it actually overloaded the server so there is still work to be done there. When I do it, I want to do it well. It should work flawlessly and provide value to you.
- New Game(s)
- Borderlands games are my main bread and butter. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is definitely a game I’m fully going to cover and I would like to expand to more games. I might gonna do some one-shot reviews as I have played other games but haven’t covered them here on the site.
- Video content
- My youtube channel got pushed to the back burner because I needed to focus more on my personal life. It’s a thing I want to get back to, however, that didn’t happen in 2021. I hope I find the time and energy in 2022 to reanimate this project.
- Milestones Goals
- Website 60M, Currently we sit at 39M this goal is ambitious.
- Twitter 10K, according to Social Blade, if the current trend continues I’ll hit 7K but let’s go bold with this one.
- Facebook hates me so I’m not setting goals for that one.
