From All of Us, To All of You: Happy Holidays!
Posted Monday, 22 December 2008 by The Crestock Team in
Inspiration
As we speak, many of you are in the final frenzied days of preparations for Christmas, Chanuka or whichever other holiday you may or may not be celebrating, and we'd like to round off an eventful year with a seasonal greetings to all of you!
From this posting, the blog goes on a
vacation a few days into the new year, when we plan on returning with
a bang. Needless to say, Crestock Stock Images will carry on doing
business through the holidays.
Excepting
the
first couple months, 2008 has been a great year for Crestock. In
building up our long term server capability, we made a server move in
January, which resulted in a whole host of technical issues, which
unfortunately took months to fully resolve.
The closure of the forum
was part of the problem, and we where forced to shut it down and
start work on a brand new forum, which was belatedly launched last
month.
All these issues hurt traffic and sales, but once we got them
all cleared up, the arrow has been pointing ever upwards.
For
the whole
year, sales at Crestock has doubled, the number of approved images
has risen by 150% while monthly unique visitors has risen by 250%
between January and November of this year. All this in spite of the
troubles we had in the first months of the year.
While such a massive
increase in traffic in many cases doesn't translate directly into increased sales,
it does in our case since it's from high converting sources such as search engines and from other websites. This again means that potential customers will have a better
chance of coming across Crestock when looking for stock image
sources.
As our surveys among existing customers shows, those who do
try out Crestock are overwhelmingly positive about our product. Of course there's always room for improvement, but to
sum all of this up: Our collection is growing rapidly, sales are up,
traffic is up and thus also our visibility to potential customers,
whom, if they try us out, can't seem to get enough.
With
the great
image collection we've now got, a well designed and well functioning
website and impressive traffic, the business side of Crestock is set for
a massive 2009.
As for
this blog,
it's been a good year too. Up until this fall, the activity level has
been a bit up and down, but we've published some great posts. In the
last
few months, we've been able to rack up a higher level of quality and
activity which we plan on carrying on into the new year.
Looking
forward, we've got
some great stuff coming up in the blog for 2009. In the meanwhile,
check out (or re-visit) our most popular and interesting posts from the
last year:
Propaganda poster design:
Propaganda
Design & Aesthetics: Soviet Retro Posters
The
Evolution of Propaganda Design: US Retro Posters
German
Propaganda Posters from the 20th Century
Wallpapers:
15
Amazing free high resolution wallpaper images
14
New high resolution desktop wallpapers
21
Magnificent high resolution wallpapers
16 Stunning
high resolution Christmas wallpapers
Yuri Arcurs' video blog:
How
to choose, instruct and working with models
How
to instruct your models: Free pose, smile, freeze
Yuri's
favorite photography gadget: The 4 piece Manfrotto monopod
Photoshop tutorials:
Creating
a propaganda poster
Creating
the hippie tank
Gift
for tomorrow
Assorted goodies:
The
worlds most extreme photography equipment
The
50 most popular web design blog posts, resources & cheat Sheets
of 2007
Another
23 signs you're becoming a design geek
10
design blogs you must read!...and with that said, we hope your 2008 has been as good as ours, and that the upcoming holiday season and the new year will be even better.
So long folks!