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Certificate of Incorporation

January 27, 2010

Just in case you’re curious—Hop Studios incorporated today.

Susie and I flipped to see who would be president. I’m not telling who won.

Posted by Travis Smith at 8:55 PM | Comments (2)

The 32 Largest ExpressionEngine Sites

January 21, 2010

People often ask us, “Can ExpressionEngine handle my potentially HUGE SITE TRAFFIC and storage requirements? Because I’m planning to get [one gazzillion hits or something like that] and I might go with Wordpress instead.”

The answer is: Yes, EE can handle your traffic (if you pay for appropriate hosting!). But it’s been hard to back that up with concrete examples of enormous sites, because there wasn’t any single list of large, successful ExpressionEngine-powered Web sites. Well, last year, that changed—we published here a list of the 10 top sites, and it’s been a regularly visited resource ever since. But a year has passed, and times change. Limiting it to the top 10 left out some amazing sites. Also, I made a New Year’s resolution to update the damn thing. So here, freshly updated, is the current definitive list of the 32 largest ExpressionEngine Web sites. (Why 32? If you have to ask, you’re not a programmer.)

But Wait: What exactly defines “largest”?

That’s a tough question, because some sites that have a huge amount of visitors might still be just one page in scope. Or a site that serves a niche audience and has a low Alexa ranking globally might have crazy active forums. We consulted with many other EE professionals to come up with the following factors, which seemed to be the most relevant ones to determine “largeness.”

number of unique visitors and pages / month
number of entries and comments
number of members and forum posts
awards and buzz

Combining all these data points gathered about more than 150 candidate sites, I came up with the ranking you see here, which was based on all the data I gathered plus a little bit of what I like to call “judgement” and you might call “Arbitrary Dart Throwing.” However, I guarantee that you’ll be impressed, and surprised, by this list.

The 32 Largest ExpressionEngine Web sites, January 2010

Please let me know of any missing sites, either in the comments or by contacting me directly. Thanks!

Change.gov: Transition site for Barack Obama
allkpop: Korean celebrity news
iLounge: All about iPod and iPhone
Periódicos Zócalo: newspaper in Mexico
Totally NSFW: adult content (porn)
Red Flag Deals: shopping deals
The Frisky: celebrity news
Gear Live: gadget news
SpeedTV: NASCAR news
Top Gear: BBC car show

paidContent.org: news about online content
DipNote: : U.S. Dept. of State’s blog
A List Apart: resource for CSS and design
BMI Music: music licensing and artist
Smart Bargains: shopping deals
Pep Boys: car parts
Campaign Monitor: email campaign tool
Trend Hunter: trends and gossip
Truthdig: independent political news
Kukla’s Korner: hockey fans

Free Games: That’s what it is
VK Magazine: Dutch news
Grist: environmental news and commentary
Orthodox Union: Jewish kosher resource
Jewish Journal: large jewish newspaper in Los Angeles
CA Government: central page for California’s Gov’t
Univ. of Miami: college site
GOP Site: U.S. political party
Cisco’s Blogs: computer hardware maker
Veerle’s Blog: known Web designer
ABA Journal: lawyer society news
Vancouver Library: city library system

(Items in bold are new since last year.)

The largest confirmed traffic I was told of belongs to iLounge, 20,000,000 pages per month, but All K Pop has 31,000,000 pages a month, unconfirmed. iLounge also has the most forum posts I know of: a mind-blowing 1,300,000. The largest number of entries I know of is JewishJournal.com: 55,000. But there’s another site, ou.org, that apparently has WAY more entries—I just wasn’t able to confirm it.

Here are the caveats: I do think that Change.gov and Periódicos Zócalo have higher traffic, but I wasn’t able to verify their numbers. And you might consider it a bit of a “cheat”, but I’m including Change.gov as of its peak traffic in January 2009, not as of its current traffic. I also left ExpressionEngine’s own site out of the rankings, but they do have a very large site with a very large number of members and posts, and would rank close to if not in the top 10.

The raw data is available for you, too, to look at. Take a look:

Click here to view the spreadsheet directly

If you think I’ve left any significant sites out, mention it in the comments and I’ll research it. The spreadsheet is a living document, so it may over time show a different ranking than the list in this article does. Special thanks to the folks on Twitter who chipped in with suggestions, and to the folks who couldn’t help me on the record.

If you’d like to see the first version of this from May 2009, click here.

To add information or suggest another site, send me an email: nep@hopstudios.com

Posted by Travis Smith at 8:33 PM | Comments (4)

Nangle+Partners Web Site

January 12, 2010

Nangle+Partners is a Canadian company located in Ottawa with considerable expertise in the education software industry. They offer a variety of consulting services to help small to medium-sized education companies market their tech products with a focus on making sales. Nangle+Partners needed one thing: an online presence to reach and assure potential clients of their skill and reach in this market.

Since this was a new site, the first steps were to assist the client in selecting and registering a domain, set them up with hosting, and installing ExpressionEngine fresh out of the package. Custom EE functionality included setting up a blog as well as a contact form for interested parties to join the Nangle VAR network. The design is minimalist and clean with plenty of white space, a subtle color palette, and simple site navigation.

I believe this project was 17 days from start to finish; we’re really happy with the results, and we wish them success!

Posted by Rachael Ashe at 3:36 PM | Comments (0)

We’re Judging the Webby Awards

January 9, 2010

This year, Hop Studios is an associate member judge in the Webby Awards. This means we do first-round evaluations on hopeful submitters’ sites, giving them a perusal and grade before the executive academy renders their final crowning of glory upon those noble sites that fly above the clouds of lesser entries.

I don’t know how many other judges there are like us. Fifty? A hundred? But there’s more than 100 categories from Activism to Youth, and I’m sure there’s more than a few entries in each category, so I’m guessing I’ve got my work cut out for me.

We’ve entered a few of our clients’ sites again this year. Don’t worry—we’ll recuse ourselves from our own sites (and from any by a direct competitor, of course). Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to delving into literally the best the Web had to offer in 2009. Wish me a fun Saturday night!

Posted by Travis Smith at 10:23 PM | Comments (0)

SLAIS: The School of Library, Archival and information Studies

January 8, 2010

SLAIS is short for The School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, an excellent academic program at UBC with a mouthful of a title. The administrative staff of SLAIS came to Hop Studios upon the recommendation of former client, the UBC Journalism school.

The SLAIS site was an old one, and had been built with flat HTML files, maintained using Adobe Dreamweaver and a complicated set of overlapping templates and Library items. While the site cries out to be moved into a content management system, that’s in the cards for a later incarnation that depends on UBC’s internal Web folks. In the meantime, however, SLAIS asked us to focus solely on a redesign of the interface that would allow them to continue using templates and Dreamweaver, but freshen the look of the site.

Because SLAIS is a UBC program we were required to work with the blue and gold school colours as well as accommodate two logos, that of UBC as well as SLAIS’ own.The new design is fresh and modern with an interface that—we think!—is much more appealing to their potential audience of internet savvy students. The site navigation has been fine-tuned in the new design to be user-friendly and easily navigable. While we were at it, we also helped to streamline the templates already in use, to make implementation and maintenance a little easier.

Posted by Rachael Ashe at 10:00 AM | Comments (1)