We (Kanishk and I) started Super Dev Resources over a year ago in Jan, 2014 with an aim to curate and create high quality free resources for app and web developers. Since then we’ve witnessed consistent growth in traffic to our site marked with some high points when we had huge spikes in traffic because of our articles getting social love on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and other social channels.
All this time Kanishk worked relentlessly to keep the site fast and performant to handle the ever increasing traffic. This even included migration from WordPress to Jekyll, one of the popular static site generators which considerably improved our website speed and helped increase our visibility in search engines. Couple of days back, he also made the new theme of Super Dev Resources live which, among other changes, includes display of social share count on opening an article.
Today we feel happy to see how Super Dev Resources has grown since its inception. Our goal has always been and will always be to learn new skills and tools, and along the way share our learnings through our blog posts and articles on Super Dev Resources that can help make the lives of app and web devs easier.
Over the past year, I created many freebies from scratch and en route learnt different tools like Inkscape, Photoshop and Illustrator. All the freebies I created were released under CC0 license. The positive feedbacks and appreciations from our readers who not only read and share our posts but even take time to mail or leave their feedbacks in the comments section – they motivate us to read more, learn more and write more useful content for them.
It’s been more than a year that I’ve been blogging and doing graphic design for Super Dev Resources. And I think this is the perfect time to take a look back into how the articles that I have written performed during this period. So I drilled down Google Analytics data to find my posts that received most page views – from search traffic as well as from social sharing. Here are my top 10 posts on Super Dev Resources:
1. 6 Infographics to help you Design the Perfect Logo
With 7.2K shares, this post is the most shared post on Super Dev Resources. I would be more than happy if we publish more posts that beat this count. Designing a logo or not, the infographics in this post are a good read to understand the design principles and color psychology involved in designing a great logo.
2. Create your own font with these 14 best tools
Along with my post on font identification tools, this post on tools for creating your own font bring in consistent organic traffic from Google, Bing and other search engines. According to Google Analytics, some of the keywords for which this post ranks high on search engines are: how to create a font, create font from image and font creator mac.
3. 350+ Free Blurred backgrounds from Blurgrounds & More
Using blurred backgrounds in web and app design continues to be a trend in 2015. No wonder this post with a huge collection of free blurred backgrounds shows in top search results of Google for search term ‘blurred backgrounds’.
4. 10 best Free Serif fonts 2014
This post lists down the free Serif fonts that were most popular in 2014 on top font sites like Google Fonts and Font Squirrel. Most of these fonts are amongst the best free Serif fonts in present time too (2015). I also wrote a similar post covering best free Sans Serif fonts and both these posts keep bringing in search traffic.
5. Making font combinations that work [Infographics]
Picking up fonts that work well together is always a daunting task. This post includes a handy infographic to understand the do’s and dont’s of making a successful font combination and has seen a fair amount of social share, mostly on Pinterest.
6. 10 Blurred Backgrounds – Freebie #6
As I mentioned above, blurred backgrounds were and are a design trend. I created this freebie that includes 10 high-resolution blurred backgrounds for our readers. This freebie not only got shared on social media but helped in getting some quality back links as well. These referrals keep sending us visitors regularly. I also published a tutorial on creating blurred backgrounds in Paint.NET and Photoshop.
7. 14 Windows Phone mockups – Free and Paid PSDs
We have published some quite successful apps in the Windows Phone store with over 3 million downloads. We know the need of marketing an app to make it a success in crowded app stores. This post has a collection of Windows Phone mockups for creating professional looking app promotional images and media content.
8. Create flat long shadow app icon in Inkscape
As graphic designer, one needs to keep up with the design trends. This tutorial shows how to create flat long shadow app icon – popular icon style trend in flat design, in Inkscape, an awesome free and open source vector graphics editor. I loved writing it and it feels great when people come and comment that they find it useful and easy to understand :).
9. Thousands of Free Sound Effects & Music for Game Development
One of my recent posts, it lists sites to source free music and sound effects for game development. The post was even shared by the official Twitter handle of Microsoft Developer UK (@msdevUK).
10. The Psychology behind Addictive Mobile Games [Infographic]
This post presents an informative infographic that decodes the psychology behind the success of addictive mobile game titles like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans. An interesting read for game developers as well as for those who remain hooked to these games.
Writing for Super Dev Resources has been a great learning opportunity for me. It has opened up possibilities that I could not even think of while doing regular office job. And when people appreciate my work, it is a quite rewarding and satisfying experience. You can visit my Behance profile that showcases my graphic design work that I’ve done till date as well as my Envato portfolio where I have put up some items for sale.
Going forward, along with writing on Super Dev Resources, I will be concentrating to improve my graphic design skills. And in coming weeks, I will also be launching GraphicFlip – a platform where I’ll be creating and sharing free graphic design assets.