Another year has passed and our site is almost two years old. 2008 has been a good year for us in many ways, with its share of success, failures and lessons learned. Today, I will tell you about 2008 and what it has meant for the Windows Vista for Beginners team.

Readers, Visits & Pageviews

As expected, in 2008 we have managed to increase the number of visitors & readers. Compared to 2007, we have tripled both the number of visits and pageviews up to 1.86 million visits, respectively 3.57 million pageviews.

In terms of RSS subscribers, we ended 2008 with more than 800 readers. Considering the fact that the whole team writes articles as a spare time hobby, we are very pleased with the results and we hope to continue the trend in 2009. If we manage to triple our results again, it will be great.

Top Site & Articles in 2008

In 2008, we participated in the Best Windows Vista Website contest and we managed to win the 3rd place. It was great to see that we are considered one of the top Windows Vista sites on the Internet.

The top articles in 2008 were the following:

• Migrate from Outlook Express to Windows Mail
• How to setup a wireless connection
• How to Map a Network Drive
• Windows Vista's biggest problem
• How to uninstall Windows Vista
• How to configure your startup programs
• Windows Vista Wallpapers Collection
• How to disable UAC
• How to setup a Bluetooth connection
• How to reset your password

Unfortunately, all these articles were published in 2007. In terms of pageviews, the best article we published in 2008 is Download Windows Vista SP1 Drivers for Creative sound cards, which is the 20th most read article of the year. This proves yet again that quality is better than quantity.

As a new year's resolution, we will try to come up with original ideas and extremely useful articles such as the ones we published in 2007.

Operating Systems & Browsers

As expected, most of our readers have Windows Vista installed. However, there are quite a lot of people still using Windows XP.

In terms of browsers used by our readers, Firefox has gained a lot of market share. We are glad to see that 33% of the readers are using our browser of choice.

Editorial Team

In 2008 we managed to expand our team a bit. We had Luminita Apostu helping us out with a few articles and most of the proof reading. Then Florin Gontariu joined us and wrote some pretty good articles. Also, he was quite active on our forums and managed to help some of our readers. He is a great addition to our team and I hope that in 2009 he will manage to find the time to write next to us.

Hosting

We started the year with a pretty standard shared-hosting plan on DreamHost. Unfortunately, it showed its limits quite often. This is why, in June, we switched to a Virtual Private Server. First we enabled DreamHost PS and, in December, we enabled also DreamHost PS MySQL to make sure our databases have enough resources. Since then, our site can easily take more visitors and it is more responsive and reliable. However, there are times when the site seems to waste a lot of resources so, in 2009, we will try to optimize things a bit.

If you want to become a DreamHost client yourself, you can use our "VISTA4BEGINNERS" promocode and get a 97$ discount. By doing this you will also help us pay some of our hosting bills.

Plans for 2009

In 2009, we want to:

• Expand our team - if you are interested in writting together with us, don't hesitate to contact us at vista4beginners at[@] gmail dot[.] com;
• Come up with fresh ideas - we want to publish articles which will end up in the top 10 most read articles of 2009;
• Prepare for Windows 7 - if Windows 7 will be launched in 2009, we will be ready to help you out with great tutorials for it.

Thank you very much for the time you have spent on our site in 2008 and for all the feedback you have sent us. Many of your e-mails have been the inspiration for the articles we published and for the improvements we made on the site.

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