John D

Our latest interview is with Zach Holman from www.Good-Tutorials.com


WF: Can you give us a short introduction to yourself?

Zach: Sure. My name's Zach Holman, and I'm a twenty year old sophomore at Carnegie Mellon University studying Information Systems (with a minor in history).


WF: Can you tell us some details about your main site, www.good-tutorials.com

Zach:It's one of the largest resources for Photoshop tutorials online. Within the next month or so I'll have listed 10,000 tutorials on it. Each day I add about 9-24 new tutorials.


WF: What do you normally do to relax in your free time?

Zach:It depends on what mood I'm in I guess. Sometimes it's just kicking back and watching a movie, sometimes it's working on new features Good-Tutorials, sometimes it's going out on the town for the night.


WF: When did you create your first website and what was it?

Zach:I created my first website a decade ago when I was ten or eleven. It was a project for some class in fifth grade. It was hosted on GeoCities (which was the coolest thing around) and didn't go over so well simply because hardly anyone in the class or my teacher knew what the heck a website really was. My lime text on black background looked cool though.


WF: How many hours do you work daily and what are your daily tasks for your sites?

Zach:I don't really look at it as an hour issue. For that matter, I don't look at Good-Tutorials as a job. It started out as a hobby and still remains a hobby, something that I work on in my free time. Of course, if my server explodes at three AM (which isn't uncommon) it turns into something a bit more than just my free time, but even so I still like the time I do spend on it. It is a bit of a time commitment though, especially since I am first and foremost a full-time student.


WF: Do you work alongside anyone else? What do they do?

Zach: Nope. Good-Tutorials is a few months away from turning four years old and it's been just me for every single one of those days. It's been three straight years (save for about two weeks when I was overseas) of daily updates to the site, too.


WF: What are you current websites and do you have plans for others anytime soon?

Zach:I have a few plans in the back of my mind for additional sites that would be fun to make, but really I just have a ton of ideas for Good-Tutorials so I really just want to keep working on improving that before I head onto anything new.

WF: What did you do to promote the site when you launched it and what do you think paid off most?

Zach:I think one of the best things is that I never set out to make a profitable site. Originally I made the site because there were only 1-2 other tutorial indexing sites out there and I thought they were fairly inefficient, plus I wanted a project to use my newfound PHP skills on. I think it kind of freed my mind a bit so I didn't have to work on trying to squeeze a profit out of anything and it let me focus on trying to do things that would help others the best. If anyone told me then that within a few years I would have added thousands of tutorials to it and that it would have attracted hundreds of thousands (millions?) of different people to it I wouldn't have believed them. I really didn't expect anything to take off from it, and even today it still amazes me that I can help out so many people with learning about Photoshop.

WF: What is the most important lesson you have learned about managing sites and what was one of your most common mistakes when you started out?

Zach: I think looking ahead is the best advice. I've been fortunate in that I haven't had massive data loss or anything, but I have evolved to have a very reliable backup system in place now that I just didn't have a few years ago, for example. I did run into some bandwidth issues that kind of bit me about two years ago once things started to take off though. There have been some other developments that occurred that could have gone off better had I thought a few things out more in advance. I guess the motto here is to "be prepared", either for the worst thing that could happen (server crashing and losing data) or the best (getting suddenly popular and having to deal with that popularity).


WF: What do you consider as your main accomplishments?

Zach:I'd have to say that Good-Tutorials ranks up there- I'm really quite proud of that site. Also, getting into the school that I'm in is probably at the top of my list.

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Thanks very much to Zach for taking time out for an interview.
I would highly recommend www.Good-Tutorials.com myself, even the most experienced webmasters and designers can learn a thing or two there.

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