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After months of preparation, I’ve finally launched my new design magazine Design Soak Magazine. It’s more like a blog than a magazine at the moment, but I have future plans…

What’s Design Soak?

Design Soak is the result of some experiments I’ve been working on over the past year.

The Failure

It all began with a sub-directory in my blog, which was named “Free Stock Photos”. You may have seen some links to these posts if you follow me on Twitter. Basically, I gave away free high-resolution images for download. You can see some example posts here, here and here.

The “sub-blog was successful in attaining backlinks, and I referred more than 100 people to Dreamstime Stock Photography (and earned next to nothing!), but it gained me very little traffic. I have now integrated these 100+ posts into andrewkelsall.com.

The Success

After this, I setup another sub-blog directory named “Spectacular”. These posts were of anything related the design and photography. Again, you may have noticed the tweets! Unlike my previous efforts, these posts were very successful and got me 400,000 pageviews of traffic over the past 2 months. I then decided the 301 all these posts to a new blog named Design Soak.

Advertising Deal

I only officially launched the “live site” on June 9th (just a week ago), and has already received 60,000 pageviews (helped along by about 100 301 redirected posts). I also negotiated a great advertising deal with Wix, so Design Soak and this site currently display their banner ads.

In a nutshell, Design Soak is an inspiration blog that features design, illustration, architecture, product design and anything else I like and think others will like too.

About the site name

Naming the site was super-hard! Every single name that I thought would be unique was actually taken. My favourite idea was IvoryNoteBook.com. Guess what? Taken; along with 10 others. Here is a list of names I considered after weeks of head-scratching:

• www.quartznotebook.com
• www.concretenotebook.com
• www.starcardig.an
• www.expresss.so
• www.galveti.ca
• www.designpersu.it
• www.designpersuit.com
• www.starcontender.com
• www.atomicnotebook.com
• www.onyxnotebook.com
• www.desibix.com
• www.dezinox.com
• www.galvanax.com
• www.starcardi.com
• www.inspiredeck.com
• www.galvanetika.com
• www.galvanetix.com
• www.galvanetica.com
• www.fluorinestar.com
• www.designhose.com

Yes, now I look at some of them, I’m glad I ended up with Design Soak. Yes, it’s nothing outrageous, but I think it conveys the site content really well and doesn’t need an explanation. If I ever want to sell the blog, it should be more sellable than, say, a site name such as starcardi.com.

Please Support Continued Success

It would be great if you could support my sites by subscribing via RSS or Email, and also sharing the posts that may have interested you. I’ve also re-launched my other blog, Pure Christian Graphic Design, too. As you’ll see, all my sites are now based upon the same template, but with major differences.

Here are the Subscriber links:

Andrew Kelsall Design: RSS | Email

Design Soak: RSS | Email

Your Thoughts?

If you have any thoughts, suggestions or remarks about Design Soak, please let me know.

PS, when time permits, I’ll be adjusting the width of both blogs to accommodate the Wix ads width.

Oh BTW, here are some recent posts from Design Soak:

Dalton Ghetti Pencil Sculptures
Phenomenal Urban Bird Houses
Cycles and Seasons Calendar
Stunning Chewing Gum Art
Astonishing Stockholm Subway Art
Top 10 Joysticks from Past and Present

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