DPS Town Hall Meeting – What’s Going on At DPS

Every couple of months I like to take a little time out to give readers a quick update on how the DPS site has been going. Consider this to be our ‘town hall’ meeting to inform you (community members) what’s been going on, give you updates and share some important notes and announcements.

DPS is owes a lot to our readership and community – you make this site what it is so it’s important to me to keep you up to date, share the highs and lows of keeping this site going and give you opportunity to give us feedback.

Milestones

• Our photography forum has just passed signing up 50,000 members in the last week.
• The forum has also recently had some record days of traffic. We recently broke our record of most users online at once (around 850) – thanks everyone for the time and effort you invest there.
• Our subscriber numbers (the total of those who subscribe via RSS or via our daily and weekly email newsletter) is fast approaching 300,000 – it looks like we’ll hit that magical number in the next couple of weeks..
• Twitter follower numbers are up over 13,000.
• Monthly traffic to DPS continues to be solid. This month we’re on track to hit 2.5 million visitors with over 5 million pages of the site viewed.

Opportunities

• We’re looking for sponsors – as you can see above DPS continues to grow and as a result we think it is a logical place for companies with photographic products to have a presence. We’d love to chat with you about how we can make this happen. More details on sponsorship opportunities here.
• New Authors – We’ve added a couple of new semi-regular authors to our writing team. You should see a few new faces with some new topics emerging. Of late we’ve particularly made an effort to expand our post processing posts to cover not just Photoshop but also Lightroom, Elements, Aperture and GIMP (something many of you have requested).
• We’re Looking for Guest Writers – We’re always on the look out for more guest writers. If you have a tip or tutorial to share on any area of photography please check out our Write for DPS page. It’s particularly a great opportunity for professional photographers (or those who are aspiring to go Pro) looking to increase their profile as we link to everyone who writes for us which can be great for your exposure.

Important Notes

• Forum Login Problems – One of the most common emails I get is from people trying to login to our forum who think that they’re a member there because they subscribe to our emails. Unfortunately this requires two separate memberships. To be a forum member simply sign up here.
• Thanks to…. – A special thanks to our writing team and forum moderators – you all continue to put a lot of time and energy into DPS and I want to acknowledge your work and investment into our community.
• Server Issues – Last month we had quite a few hiccups in our forums with our server. Most of these bugs are now fixed and the forum is working a lot faster and with less errors than previously. Thanks for your patience in dealing with those issues.

Help Us Get Better

By no means is DPS perfect. We are run by a small team and know there are many ways that we can improve. We’re tackling issues as they arise and are working hard to keep DPS as useful as possible. However we continue to rely upon your support in some of the following ways:

• Feedback – If you have any constructive feedback or suggestions for DPS please do feel free to contact me through our contact form. I can’t respond to everyone individually but do read and consider all feedback carefully.
• Spread the Word – please do consider sharing DPS and our tutorials with your network of family, friends and those you connect with on social media sites.
• Help us Find Strategic Partners – as I mentioned above we are looking for sponsor partners at present. Running a site this size takes a lot of effort and rising costs. We’d love to cover these and be able to invest in new features – if you have contacts in companies that you think would like to get their message out to our kinds of readers please let them know of the opportunity.
• Participate – ultimately the best way you can help us get better is to get involved. Join our forum, sign up for our newsletter, submit a guest post, leave comments and interact with your fellow readers. All of this helps improve what we do and make the site more useful to you and your fellow readers.

Thanks everyone – I appreciate you and can’t wait to see what the next few months have in store for DPS.