htpcbeginner.com 1st Birthday: Recap and Next Steps

May 21^st marked the first birthday or htpcBeginner (formerly LinuXplained). Truly though, it has been 2.5 year since I started a tech blog on WordPress on my first Ubuntu Server back in December 2010. With nearly 1200 likes, 600 followers, and 120 plusones/followers, we are slowly but surely growing to be one of the blogs that provide good content on setting up home servers and adding features to maximize the use of home servers. And since, I began my blog on my home server, we cover a bit of WordPress too. I have truly enjoyed maintaining this blog, researching new topics, and communicating with my audience. Thank for your continued support.

Redesign

I stumbled upon responsive web design and I thought it was the right time to implement some of the ideas and improve htpcbeginner.com's design. The product is what you currently see:

We moved from StudioPress's Lifestyle theme to responsive News theme with some modifications:

1. We have built-in many of the functions into the theme thereby eliminating the need for several plugins. This has significantly increased our page speed and enhanced visitor experience.
2. For the most part, we retained the Blue, Dark Gray and White colors for the them with just a bit of tweaks here and there.
3. The modified theme follows the web standards with a clean CSS, JS, and jQuery scripts to improve page speed.
4. To enhance the experience of audience using larger screens (60% of the visitors) we have now increased the width from 960px to 1140px with some modifications. So those visitors with larger screens would see more content in their viewport. We did not ignore the remaining 40% of the visitors. For them the page would automatically resize to 960px width.
5. In order to fill the extra white space on larger screens and improve the appearance, we also added responsive ads that automatically resize to fill the space based on screen size.

There are a lot more frontend and backend changes that contribute to improving visitor experience. Hope you like and enjoy the changes.

Write for htpcBeginner

Like most startup blogs, htpcbeginner.com is still a one man show, who only works part-time on this blog. We brought several interesting articles to you last year. As much as we would like to bring you lot more quality articles to you it is currently not possible. Therefore, we are actively seeking guest authors. You may ask what you will get out of contributing to htpcbeginner.com. Here is our answer:

• Paid Authorship
• Reach >45,000 monthly visitors
• Growing community of followers
• Backlinks to your site

So if are interested in taking a stab at blogging or if you already have a blog and would like to expand your presence get in touch with us or check out Write for htpcBeginner page for more details.

So long for now

We understand that this might not be the most interesting post for many visitors but we had to express our gratitude and keep our loyal readers updated. Once again, thank you for all the support. We hope you are as excited as we are and continue to subscribe/follow us for all the latest updates.