I’m excited (and more than a little bit jealous) to announce that the winner of our SitePoint Reader Survey competition is…
Ivan Soria
Ivan is a designer, student and entrepreneur from Mexico, and his interests include motion media and video games. He’s the lucky winner of a Nintendo Wii and TWO copies of Guitar Hero III.
Ivan’s suggestion for improving sitepoint.com was selected from a pool of nearly 5,000 entries. Here’s what he wrote:
I would totally love to see a SitePoint desktop or web application where one could find some tools aimed at web design, coding and business. For example, it would be cool to have a CSS coder with quick access/interaction to the reference section.
But Ivan didn’t stop at just one idea — he had quite a few. For example, he had some ideas on the type of content that would make him visit sitepoint.com more often.
I think it would be useful to have a weekly featured digital/web artist, and to see his or her portfolio. I’d like to see SitePoint develop a finer aesthetic sense, rather than having so many tutorials. (I write this because I think of SitePoint as more a “thinking” or “philosophy” site, rather than practical learning — we all know where to go to learn our favorite design/coding package.)
Hmm, we actually had a greater number of requests for more tutorials, Ivan, so I don’t think you’ll see us easing up on that front. But we definitely plan to adopt your suggestion for more interviews and design case studies, as many others requested this type of content as well.
Of course, Ivan didn’t stop there:
I’d love to have everything business-related in one place. Some sort of journal, calendar or project management tool could be integrated into an online SitePoint application — an opportunity board where one could find a coder or designer in distress and collaborate for some freelancing projects; a message center on the top part of the homepage could be useful to notify if a new job/collab or business-related matter has arrived. This app or new section would be called My Site or My SitePoint. We could sign up and log in from SitePoint’s homepage, and also use it as a social networking tool, to build a strong community of web designers and coders.
Ivan’s idea is certainly an ambitious one, but it echoes a recurring theme — that you want SitePoint to become more customizable, more social and for the site to offer more tools that let you do your job.
Another idea I have for your site, a strong one, is to build a new section. A “How to” or “Case studies” section, where you take a successful, well-designed or marvelously coded site and try to explain the entire production (or a summed up version of it) step by step, focusing on the programming, design and business/marketing sides of it. This way we could learn from actual live commercial examples and apply some of your books or article knowledge (to our own projects).
This is another recurring theme in the responses we received — standalone articles are interesting, but complete, start-to-finish tutorials are more useful in allowing you to progress your skills, whether they be technical, creative or business-related. I’ll be talking more about some initiatives that we have coming up that will go part-way to addressing this.
I’ll be posting some more about the survey results in the coming week, but that’s enough for now. Please join me in congratulating Ivan!
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