ILovePhotoblogs.com started as a project to capture as many great photographers as possible in one location. Going against my natural “castle-building” tendencies, I’ve decided to take this project “live” and let it evolve. That will explain you why might see the site occasionally change while you are browsing. It’s the tinker-er in me.
My love for photography began at an early age, having my first darkroom when I was 11 years old. Photography has been in my family for many years and my father stills operates his own photo studio with more than 35 years in the business. I sold my first photograph at age 13, to the local town newspaper. At that point, I was hooked!
After 20+ years in the photography business, I have since moved into the IT field, like half of the world. Still long for the days of looking for the perfect shot! This project is my escape.
This site was designed to give photographers and photography enthusiasts a place to showcase their wonderful photography and to view outstanding works of others. I highly encourage all of our readers to submit their photography for review, and hopefully get featured on the site. While I cannot publish all submissions, quality sites are given top priority. To have your photo site considered for publication, please use the Submit URL form. Hope you enjoy ILovePhotoblogs as I provide a constant stream of photo blogs for you to discover.
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UPDATE(4/19/2009) – Since starting this photoblog back in March 2008, we’ve grown to include 455+ posts to an audience of around 30,000 unique readers. While I continue to redesign this site on an average of once every 2 months, this site’s mission has not changed from the beginning…always on the lookout for new photoblogs to write about and expose to our audience.
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UPDATE(11/13/2009) – I just wanted to update our totals, in case you’re keeping score at home. We have now surpassed 720 posts, to an audience of 56,712 unique readers as of this morning. On the design side…I’m really pleased with our current design..straightforward and clean. In addition, I’ve removed a lot of clutter and the dramatic change in our bounce rate shows we’re on the right path. Up until May 2009, our bounce rate was averaging 82%..meaning 8 out of 10 people landed on one of our pages and left without viewing anything else…Not good! Over the past 2 months, our bounce rate has plummeted to 60%…WOW. I’m loving it.
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UPDATE (4/09/10) – The support you have blessed this site with is nothing short of awesome. We are now averaging 10k+ unique readers per month! Our focus to daily postings seems to have clicked with you, the reader. Thanks again for your support!
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UPDATE (10/07/10) – Quite a lot has happened here since the last update. Last fall, we committed to daily postings and the reception was great. This past June, we upped the ante to 2 posts daily and since August we have been posting 3x per day. We understand the need for fresh content and with each increase in daily postings, the traffic has responded in a positive manner. As a result, in September we recorded over 21,000 unique visitors!
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UPDATE (03/03/11) – The posts (1726 and counting) continue to roll on and I’d like to give a big Thank You to all the loyal readers for your great emails and photo blog submissions! For the past 3 months we have been averaging over 33,000 unique visitors per month.
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UPDATE (12/31/11) – What a great day for an update. This coming New Year will mark the start of my fifth year on this wonderful project. Time really does fly when you’re having fun. In addition to running this site (which I truly love), I having been working on another project to address the tons of great photo blogs I receive but don’t have the space or time to accommodate them all. I hope to roll out this new service early 2012.
One of the hardest parts of running a site over a period of time, especially one that contains a large number of links, is dealing with dead links. Websites come and go, but trying to manage bad links is quite a chore. Broken Link Checker is my WP plugin of choice for helping out with this task. Each day I receive an email with each bad link to review. Thought I’d pass this along in case you encounter the same issues.
During this year, I was approached 3 times to sell this site. Since I still have high hopes for ILovePhotoBlogs, I decided to stay the course. I say it often, but it is genuine..Thank you all for the support you have given me over the years! Without your submissions of great photography, this site would be non-existent.
Here are a few fun facts about ILovePhotoBlogs (data from 3/9/08 – 12/31/11)
- 553,571 unique visitors
- 1,023,891 pageviews
- Top browsers used to view site – Firefox 36.60%, IE 25.28%, Chrome 18.08%
- Top traffic source – Search engines – 58.53%; Referring sites – 28.18%; Direct traffic – 12.51%
- Top keyword – Photography Blogs
As always, keep those photoblogs coming. While we continue to try new features (some work, some not so good), one constant is our dedication to user submitted photoblogs.
~Rick