We rolled out search back on July 23rd and then improved on it within a week on July 31st. I thought I'd share with you some neat tidbits on who's searching and what's being searched for.

» As of last night (August 25th), 7,877 unique keywords have been searched for.
» On July 31st, we had 490 unique search words, which was the highest number of unique keywords searched for in one day -- nearly 500!
» 5% of all the people who visit Carbonmade perform at least one search and those people spend an average of five minutes browsing after their search.
» The top search term is "Tel Aviv AND Illustrator".
» "Web Design AND Poland," "Fashion AND New York," "Ruby AND Design," and "redator" round out the rest of the Top Five search keywords.

So, we're not quite Google (yet), but we're getting there! If you have any suggestions for how we can make search even better, please drop us a note. We're always looking to incorporate your feedback as best we can.

Twitter is a little web app for keepin' up-to-date with your friends, and more recently for finding freelance work. It’s in effect a micro-blog where you post a "tweet" (140 characters or less) and everyone following you will receive the message. It's as simple as that.

People all around are falling for it hard: we’re following over 100 Carbonmade fans! Total insanity (but we wish there were more of you)! Through Twitter we're announcing small tidbits of news -– maybe even some sneak previews –- and we get to chat openly with anyone who's around. We dig it and we hope you join us.

Creative people are using Twitter to promote themselves. A designer friend of ours, Tim Van Damme, told us only a few weeks ago that over 50% of his new clients have found him through Twitter. All Tim does to promote himself on Twitter is update us about his day, what he’s working on, and his thoughts and views about life and design.

Your tweets help paint a picture of what you're about and we think that’s cool. It’s a great marketing tool for getting work, as word-of-mouth is the best marketing tool, bar none. It's not just for web designers either; plenty of the people we follow are rabid users of Carbonmade and display all types of work.

Come tweet with us! Follow us -- and we'll follow you back.

» Carbonmade
» Spencer Fry (Business)
» Jason Nelson (Code)
» Dave Gorum (Design)
» And anyone else mentioning Carbonmade on Twitter.

If you can suggest any topics you’d like us to Tweet about, e-mail us.

Wow, we are gobsmacked! This past year has been amazing, we've more than tripled the portfolios on Carbonmade from 16,004 on June 1st, 2007 to just over 50,000 today. We launched Carbonmade in March 2006 on a lark and with no expectations. Since then, we've reached mind-boggling numbers -- at least to us -- of 50,000+ portfolios, 100,000+ projects, 750,000+ images, and 1,000+ videos. Who'da thunk it?!

Artists and designers continue to pour into Carbonmade. We get an average of about 150 folks per day signing up and that's growing all the time. It seems that offering a clean, simple, ad-free canvas to show off your work has made an impact with all you great creative types out there!

We have recently been rolling out behind-the-scenes performance updates, small cosmetic changes, and updates to our billing system, but we are working on a significant update of Carbonmade to be released sometime in 2008. With this update and the continued support of all of you fine folks, we hope to continue our growth and reach 100,000 by the end of the year.

Thanks so much and here’s to the next 50,000!

The More You Know: Editing (Part 2)

This is Part 2 of "The More You Know: Editing" series. In this blog entry, I'm covering the different About page features, adding Google Analytics to track visitors to your portfolio, and the different display options. Fully customized portfolios have a more complete feel to them, and this blog entry is meant to help you achieve that feel.

The most important thing to know is how to edit the look of your portfolio, which I covered in Part 1; but the second thing to know is that you can customize your About page. Under the About tab of your backend, you can edit various options. (Note: Everything you edit here will be publicly available on your About page.) You can add your Real Name, Email, Location, Phone Number, About You, Profile Picture, Areas of Expertise, Skills, and whether or not you're Available for Freelance. Customizing this page will help visitors to your portfolio to learn more about you.

Next, after fully customizing your About page, and getting people to view your portfolio, you're going to want to be able to see who's viewing the portfolio and how they found it. Carbonmade supports Google Analytics, which provides by far the best statistics for your portfolio. You'll need a Google account -- which is simple enough to get -- and when you have it, visit Google's Analytics page to Sign Up. After you've signed up, locate your UA code, which looks something like UA-XXXXX-X where the X's are numbers or letters. Copy that code (including the UA) into the Google Analytics area under Settings in your backend. In 24-72 hours, you'll be able to see who''s viewing your portfolio!

The last thing I'm going to cover is the different display options. After logging into your backend, you'll see your Projects listed. You can choose to have between one to three thumbnails per row to display on your portfolio's homepage. You can also re-order the Projects by dragging and dropping them. The images inside your Projects can also be displayed in various ways. Click on your Project and you can choose to display your images in a Gallery View (with thumbnails or not) and in List View.

I hope you enjoyed reading through this two part series. Part 1 and Part 2 cover nearly all the customizable features of Carbonmade. These are all simple and clean features that allow you to do what you need to do to display your portfolio as impressively as possible. If you have any questions, please e-mail us and we'd be happy to help you out.

I thought I'd write today on some intriguing features of Carbonmade. Hopefully this post will help you better customize your portfolio. I'm just going to touch on three topics today -- adding custom thumbnails, changing your background and font, and adding text to images -- and will cover more later.

A special feature of Carbonmade is being able to add a custom thumbnail to each project you have in your portfolio. This makes the landing page of your portfolio a lot more attractive to your visitors. A lot of the best portfolios on Carbonmade use this technique to make their portfolio more inviting. To do this: after you've created a project, click on the project and then on the Project Thumbnail button on the top right. The image sizes are as follows:

1 per row: 780px x 140px
2 per row: 375px x 140px
3 per row: 240px 140px

Here are some portfolios that use this method:

Devon Gibbs
Gary Fox-Robertson
Etienne Malphettes

Another way to improve the presentation of your portfolio is by changing its background and font. By default the background is black and the font is serif, but you can change the background to grey and the font to sans-serif if you prefer it. Your images may look better on one background than the other, so try them both and see what works best for you.

Adding text labels to your portfolio's images may help explain things to your visitors. You can do this by clicking on the project, then the image, and then on the Image Caption box.

We've recently joined Twitter and Facebook and would love it if you'd add us as friends. Through Twitter, we're able to follow what you do and see what you value as a designer, which helps us improve things. We can also share small snippets of news with you that are not big enough for their own blog posts, but that still interest you. And with Facebook, we're hoping to create a little community that Carbonmade users can be a part of.

The other thing we want to mention is that you can subscribe to this blog with RSS. You can click the feed icon on the top right of most web browsers to subscribe or add us to your preferred RSS reader. We had a rather long hiatus without posts, but are planning to write more often with bits of information and news that we think you'll enjoy. Subscribing to our RSS feed is the easiest way to get them while they're hot.

Carbonmade has reached two significant milestones within the last few days: over 40,000 portfolios and 600,000 images! These numbers are quite significant for us, as we didn't anticipate that Carbonmade would ever reach over 1,000 portfolios, let alone 40,000. And all the thanks goes to the great people using Carbonmade every day, sharing it with friends, and being amazingly helpful with feedback. Please continue to email us with any questions, concerns or suggestions.

Last night at around 8 in the evening, our database got corrupted after a hard drive failure and a lot of people’s portfolios were affected. We realized shortly after the database went kaboom that our backup system wasn’t working properly since migrating Carbonmade to new servers on November, 21st. We were able to restore everyone’s work up to that date, but any change to your portfolio since we have to manually restore one-by-one. We apologize for any headaches caused and we should be able to restore most everything over the next few days. We’ve since configured a triple redundant backup system to prevent this from happening again. In an effort to make things right, we’re happy to offer you extra images, projects, a discount on your next months services, or a free month to paying customers. You can email us with how we can best compensate you.

UPDATE (Tuesday, January 8, 2008):

As of today, any portfolio data that can be recovered has been recovered. Those of you that are still affected -- data loss or loss of your account -- should e-mail us at support@carbonmade.com for further instructions. Again, we really regret any problems that you have encountered and have put in place measures so that this will never happen again.

I figured I'd dust the cobwebs off this blog with a short introduction of myself -- the newest nterface guy -- and add a brief update on Carbonmade, starting with the third paragraph, so you can skip the first two if you want to get to the good stuff. I graduated from Yale in May, 2006, moved to New York City a few months later and have been living here ever since. I've worked on a long list of Internet startups and, while I'm only twenty-three years old, I started my first Internet business in 1995 when I was eleven, and I never looked back.

The first reassurance is that Carbonmade is alive and well. We've been busily working on a number of things. We've made available thirty-five new frequently asked questions, having sifted through your emails over the past eighteen months and found the -- you guessed it -- most frequent questions. If you don't find your answer there, you can still email us as you previously have.

Along with our spiffy new FAQ, we've squashed over a dozen irritating bugs and published the updates to Carbonmade. Your portfolio should be running more smoothly than ever now, thanks to Jason. Keep sending us any odd irritants that you come across, if any, and we'll get to work on those too. Enjoy the upcoming holidays and we'll see you in the New Year!

-- Spencer

Wow, today we hit 5,000 portfolios. A big thanks to every one of you and keep showing off your fantastic work!