Anglotopia’s 1,000th Post

At some point today, Anglotopia’s 1,000th post will be published. It’s a testment to how much Anglotopia has grown that I can’t pin down exactly what post will be the lucky number 1,000.

This is a major milestone for us and it comes on top of our best month in traffic yet – over 100,000 visitors! It also caps off an excellent year where the site helped us achieve our goal of getting back to Britain when we won the British Airways Face to Face contest.

This day also represents a new direction for Anglotopia.

Before you scream in horror – don’t worry the same old blog content will not be going anywhere and we’ll continue to update it every day with the latest news that Anglophiles care about.

The majors changes will be happening behind the scenes. We’re going to be launching new content sections, more than I can list at this moment, but here are some examples:

• Downloads
• Britain Video Gallery
• Britain Photo Gallery
• British Slang Dictionary
• Audio Gallery
• Database of Every Tourist Information Office in Britain.
• And more!

We’ve been working on these new content sections for the last couple months and they’re going to be fantastic. Our goal is to create a content centered portal dedicated to all things Britain. The new content will be rolling out over the next couple weeks and the biggest feature that I’m most proud of is that anyone will be able to contribute – anyone can submit a video, picture, word, etc and help build the best database of information about Britain possible.

Now for those that care about the technical aspect. This site runs on WordPress using a Studiopress premium theme. It works well for a blog. So well, in fact, that won’t change. The problem is that WordPress is limited in growing to new types of content. I have a lot of experience working with the Drupal Content Management system and we’ve decided that will be the best platform to build out the new content sections.

Things have been on hold until we’ve been able to pay a developer to create an identical theme for Drupal so that the user experience is seamless no matter where you are on the site. It’s very symbolic for us – to be able to make a small investment in Anglotopia to help it grow. The developer is almost done and we can’t wait to implement it.

We’re entering ‘start-up’ territory and we pride ourselves in having started Anglotopia and turning it into a small profitable site that has no debt. We now have paying advertisers. We’ve got marketing partnerships coming up. It’s become very clear to us that Anglotopia will one day be a viable business and we hope that it will propel us towards our dream of making a life in the UK – sooner rather than later.

I could not have made it this far alone.

My beautiful wife Jackie must get props for encouraging me to develop this site and doing the one thing that’s hardest for her – give up my time with her so I can work on this site round the clock. Not only that she’s joined the team, writing great posts and developing our new content. She singlehandedly built a database of over 800 British Tourist Information offices.

I have to thank our regular readers – you are the backbone of this site and we count on your readership to propel us to new heights. Please keep coming back.

And I must thank our crew of fantastic columnists – looking at the user stats I learned that I’ve only written 70% of the posts on this site – that means 30% of our great content comes from the best blog contributors a blogger could ask for. Without you guys, we would not be at 1,000 and we would not have the traffic that we do.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Next week is our first big marketing campaign for an advertiser – British Bazaar Week is coming starting Monday. And later in February we’ll have a special British Airways deal just for Anglotopia readers. Stay tuned.

Now, who wants to take bets on when we’ll hit 2,000 posts?