Today’s the final day of January, marking the end of the first month of this website’s existence. To commemorate the occasion, I thought it would be fun to take a step back and look at what’s been achieved in the last month, the lessons I’ve learned throughout and what my future plans for the site are at this point in time.
It took me and my dad a few days at the start of the month to get everything running, and then we continued to work over the next week to give the website a logo and get it secure. Despite the fact that it is a WordPress template and should be fairly simple, I would have been completely lost without dad’s help. This is the first website I’ve managed, so having someone experienced to give me advice has been invaluable and I’m very thankful for it.
After we got the website functional on the 6th of January, I have posted an article every day without fail on a variety of topics. Including this one, there are a total of 26 articles across 15 different categories. The amount of variety in my posts has been very liberating, but I feel that some variety will likely be reduced in future months thanks to some of the series that I’ve started. I’m really enjoying the ongoing nature of my ‘Making A World‘ articles, and will continue it alongside other series like ‘Machine or Dream‘ in the future. I will still write articles about the absurd, but it feels good to have discovered some topics that I look forward to writing about again and again.
Aside from posting every day, there has been no real schedule to my articles. I simply posted what I felt like at the time, providing that it was something different to the day before. As I build my habits and writing skills, I’m going to try to implement more of a schedule for the future. This could mean a review every Wednesday or a D&D article every Sunday, but the actual timetable is yet to be decided. Additionally, while I will try to stick to this format as best I can, I won’t be forcing myself to stick to it every time. A new and exciting story may develop and be time-sensitive, and I don’t want to miss the chance to write about it by being confined to a schedule, so I’ll follow the way of the Pirate Code and call them guidelines rather than actual rules.
Something I know that I need to improve on is the graphics included in my articles. Both image size and correct credits have been issues I have been working on, as I very much want creators to be recognised for their work and for the website to run smoothly, but the earlier articles especially fall foul of this mistake. I am going to work my way back through them and make the necessary updates, so there will be a gradual improvement not only in my recent articles but across the entire website as a whole.
Heading into the next month, I’m looking to start spreading the news of this site to people who aren’t my close friends and family. I have started streaming on Twitch and have been creating content on there which I later post to Absurdity, in a move that I hope will drive views between the two so they become more popular simultaneously. I also need to make a fully fleshed out ‘About Me’ page that accurately shows who I am and where to contact me. Finally, I need to spread my social media wings and become an active user of Twitter and Instagram, sharing each daily post there and interacting with others to increase visibility.
With all this going round my head, I have decided that I will write 6 articles a week during the month of February. The non-writing day is time I will use to work on the website and past articles, ensure my accounts are up to scratch across all the separate platforms and research new and exciting topics to write about. With luck, the reduction in the number of articles will lead to an improvement of quality not just in the articles but across the whole ‘Charlie Perkins’ brand.
Thank you so much for reading my articles and joining me on this new chapter of my life. I’m enjoying it immensely, and am already feeling more inspired and creative than I have since even before the pandemic. Now that I have left my previous position to focus on this project full time, I’m sure I’ll be able to keep up the stream of new and exciting content that hopefully will spread to the furthest reaches of the web.
All images taken from Unsplash.
Comments
Good luck Chazzle!