Like every year, I want to take some time to discuss the state the site is currently in, the direction it’s going to go in this year and what happened over the past year. Those of you who read the State of Noise Vortex post for last year might remember how euphoric I was after such a prolicific and, by my standards, successful 2017. I had managed to keep the site updated weekly for an extended period of time and was slowly starting to accumulate some traffic. I was sure that I would be able to keep riding the wave well into 2018 as well. As you can tell by looking at the archive, however, the opposite was the case. 2017 was one of my least productive years since I started Noise Vortex and even though I think the reviews and articles I wrote last year were the best material I have ever posted on this website up to that point, I was still very disappointed with how little I managed to put out.
It was a mixture of being frustrated with music, generally being busier than the year before and being less inspired as well as having a more time consuming writing process to ensure higher quality that lead to the scarcity of updates that the site received last year. I won’t drop the goal of trying to put out as much quality content as I can, but this year I am probably going to be a bit more realistic about how much I can actually post.
As for the site itself, there were no major updates as traffic to justify a big time investment into development was lacking. A few broken gears had to be fixed here and there but the site is fine the way it is in terms of features and functionalities. One major change that did take place, however, was related to the hosting conditions of the site. I am now paying the site’s webspace myself which ups the cost of maintaining the site for me to about 80€ a year. For now the site has a webspace for the next 5 months. Paying for more is not a problem, but this change brought up some things I used to contemplate in the past as well as some new questions. As I said, financially maintaining the site is not a problem for me but I do have to wonder if it’s worth it paying almost a 100€ a year “just for this”. This ties in to the question of whether or not I want Noise Vortex to be some kind of recognized brand, if I want it to grow bigger and be more well-known. As some of you might know this started out as a purely personal project, a portfolio for me to present myself. The question is if I want to keep it that way. If I want the site to grow I have to recruit more writers to update the site more often, to cover more topics and generate more traffic. If I keep creating all the content myself the updates will remain infrequent and there will be a big gap in-between site updates sometimes but the site won’t fail its initial purpose. Another option was to shut down the site and find a place to be a guest writer at or maybe even a fulltime member of the staff (if you’re looking for writers let me know and we can see where it goes). It’s a possibility that I’m open for but I like being my own boss and being able to do anything I want with the site.
As it stands this is the plan for the site:
- Release quality content as often as possible
- Be more active on Facebook
- Put the Twitter account on ice, it doesn’t work out for me
That about sums up the current development plans for the site. I have some ideas for posts already and I will post something if I can kick my lazy ass into gear sometime soon to put out a review. Last but not least, I want to thank you all for another year. I am thankful for every new like on Facebook, every pageview, every shared post and all the support. I know January has almost passed but I wish you all a great 2018.