As we prepare to enter 2017 and all the surprises it surely has in store for us, we want to take a moment to shine light on several un-sung efforts that have been going on behind-the-scenes in 2016.
These are investments of time, manpower and money that improve the overall user experience for the hundreds of thousands of visitors like you who use PeakProsperity.com each month.
Most of these solutions aren't 'sexy', nor necessarily immediately obvious when they launch (which, in many cases, is the goal). But they're fundamental to the well-being of this site and we think it important that you have an understanding of the good work being done to make PeakProsperity.com deliver even more value to you in the future.
So, what kind of improvements?
Glad you asked. Let's start with several that have already launched:
A Faster, More Secure Site
Over the summer, we migrated Peak Prosperity to Pantheon, a "cloud-based" server solution. Why should you care?
Well, doing so has made the website substantially faster to load. On average, our page loading times have been cut in half.
And on this new platform, the site is also now much more stable and less prone to outages -- especially when we receive spikes in traffic, which we're (happily) experiencing with greater regularity now. In past years, it was not uncommon for a traffic surge to knock our servers offline for a few hours (or on one horrible occasion, a few days).
Moving to Pantheon allowed us to make the site more secure, too. You probably didn't notice it, but a few months back, all of our pages shifted over to the HTTP Secure protocol -- meaning the url for every page starts with "https" instead of just "http" -- which adds additional layers of defense to our site operations. We're also working on more potent forms of spam protection which we plan to deploy within the next month.
And it's not only our users who benefit from these improvements. Search engines like Google give higher priority to sites that load quickly, have a high % uptime, and use https. So by improving things for our current users, we're also helping new ones discover our content more easily.
New Email Platform
Again, another change that may not have been obvious when it occurred: we've recently moved the management and sending of all of our emails to MailChimp/Mandrill.
The upside for our users is greater dependability, more timeliness of delivery, a better fitting of content formatting to your email reader, and much more business intelligence that allows us to better optimize our offerings going forward.
Mobile Version Of PeakProsperity.com
This one is *almost* live. As in, it should hopefully launch within a few days.
In 2016, 25% of our audience accessed PeakProsperity.com on a mobile device. Right now, those folks see the exact same site layout as those who visit us on their desktop/laptop computer or tablet. Since our site is text-heavy, it can be pretty hard to read on the small screen of a smartphone.
We've wanted to create a mobile-optimized version of PeakProsperity.com for some time now, but were limited for several reasons. Fortunately, the move to Pantheon removed a lot of those constraints; so we've been hard at work getting a mobile version developed and deployed.
Once live, mobile users will get access to all of the same PP.com content and features, but things will be laid out in a much more easily readable and navigable way.
We're very excited to take better care of our mobile users, especially as that percentage of our audience grows substantially each year. We'll be sure to announce the launch of the new mobile site as soon as it's live -- we'll be eager to hear your feedback.
And There's More To Look Forward To...
The projects above haven't been our only irons in the fire. We have quite a long list of additional improvements that we want to bring you, too, in the upcoming year.
The big challenge has been finding enough bandwidth and capital to pursue them given everything else this (mostly) 2-man operation is juggling. And since our primary mission is bringing you the highest quality content possible, we need to make sure we don't compromise that when diverting attention to these other projects.
One of the focuses of Chris' and my recent trip to the Opal Wealth Conference in Southern California earlier this month was to devote time to determining our priorities for 2017. Based on the outcome of that planning, here's just some of what to expect from us over the next 6-9 months:
- more webinars (in the vein of this pilot we did earlier this year)
- more video content
- updating the Crash Course video series for 2017
- surfacing more solutions & how-to content for living with more resilience
- better site search functionality
- collapsing Forums & Groups into a single, more intuitive offering
- making it easier/more intuitive to upload images within Comments
- lots and lots of back-end optimizations that you might not notice but will make things a lot more efficient for us in serving your needs better
Thanks for taking a moment to learn about the kind of work that goes on behind-the-scenes here. We're looking forward to continuing to improve things on this website for you in 2017 (and beyond), and your feedback is crucial in helping us best do that -- so please share it as you have it!
cheers,
Adam
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://peakprosperity.com/shifting-into-higher-gear/
