Site News March 24

To our regular visitors thank you for bearing with us over the last couple of months whilst work has been taking place on the site. Some of you may have noticed the site changing multiple times throughout the last couple of months including showing as it did back in April 2021! This has no doubt been confusing.

There is a reason for all this which is to solve some longstanding issues with the site since we took it back over in 2023. In our first year since taking back over the site, things have not gone as we would have hoped. The number of visits we get is way down on what it was before we took a step back from the site in 2021 and shows no real sign of recovering. This is problematic due to the way we are reacquiring the site at significant cost. It means every month we run this site, we lose hundreds of dollars, and with things they way they are in the UK, it’s not ideal.

You may have noticed that the site was performing very slowly over the last couple of days, this should now be resolved although for some users it may take a day or to longer for you to see this.

We are aware that some of our designs have broken download links. We are working on fixing those but if you do spot any then share the link you are trying to download and we can resolve it for you. Simply contact us and we will come back to you as soon as we can.

Earlier this year there was an update to the ecommerce platform we use to allow you to add your downloads to a cart then checkout and download them. This system failed because the system we host this site on was not powerful enough. This has at least for us, resulted in increased costs investing in technologies that allow us to keep the site running.

We originally switched to this new way of presenting our files in August and from the data we can see, it is preferred over the old way.

Recently we removed a number of designs on the site that were created whilst we took a step back, we didn’t think they would cut out correctly and need a lot of work to make them like the types of designs we would make. If something is missing and you would like us to send it to you anyway then please get in touch. Perhaps we will set up a category for these types of files in the future.

We do have plans to add more designs starting in around may whilst we take a step back to assess what we can do to turn things around on the site.

How can you help keep this site going?

Got to be honest here and say that longer term running this site as we do today is not going to be sustainable with the current number of visitors and advertiser revenue. As mentioned before, we lose $100’s per month.

One way you can help is by sharing links to our site on your social media networks. The more people that know about us the more traffic we can get. This should hopefully allow us to reduce the number of adverts we present because we know they are less than ideal, but they contribute a small amount to the costs.

Of course you can always support us as well, but there is no pressure for you to do so.

Thanks for reading.