Today marks the first anniversary of this website. As coincidence would have it, this is also Canada Day, or the day in 1867 when this country was formed – so, happy Canada day!

Last year, on this date, I registered the name “www.ibuildit.ca” and signed up for a year of web hosting. I was more than a little apprehensive about this, as is the case whenever I have to pay for something that I’m not fully familiar with. I also realized that I was starting something that was a fairly large commitment, assuming it went anywhere.

There wasn’t much here in those first days, as I was totally and completely new to the website building thing, but eager to get started and to learn. Learn I did, although I did make some mistakes along the way. It would be nice to be able to go back and fix the errors I made due to my inexperience, but that isn’t really an option now. These are mainly file location problems that are more of a nuisance than anything else. Note to those that may want to start a site like this: organize! plan! Know that eventually there will be a lot of content, using a lot of images and that these should be in their own folders, not all jumbled in the root folder.

By the end of July last year, there were five projects on the site: table saw, disk sander, sanding station, workbench and sanding table. It started getting some traffic: about 1700 pageviews for the month in total. Not a lot, but a good start.

The site has steadily grown since then. Each month, more and more people visit, viewing more and more pages. I’ve tried to be diligent about adding good quality content every week, though some projects are clearly more popular than others.

Moving forward, I want to eventually refocus this site by splitting off the non-woodworking content. While the electronics section does get a fair amount of traffic, the bulk of the visitors to the site are here to see the workshop and woodworking projects. I don’t feel that I can add an electronics project as the weekly featured article, since it really doesn’t seem to fit in with what the site has become. The electronics projects won’t disappear, but will be on another site where they can get the attention they deserve.

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you come back again soon. There are many new and exciting projects to look forward to over this next year.