WhatARead.com

Every time I find a new article online that I like and want to keep forever, I would save them to my Evernote notebooks. Over time, I've probably created a treasure trove of wonderful articles that have helped me learn a lot of wonderful stuff.

So the idea came in my final year of university back in 2014 to create a website to host all these articles and build something bigger to make it sustainable.

 

Keeping it Light

I can't say more about this. The domain name is so awesome. That aside...

The website is hosted on a very cheap (and slow) shared hosting and is built on a free Wordpress theme.

The main reason for this is to keep it light on my wallet, MVP style.

However, as with any free Wordpress themes, the theme required some heavy work on its CSS and some basic PHP work to make its navigation and looks better.

I've based the look and feel ala Pinterest, while the colour tone is a muted green that is friendly to the reader's eyes while the scan through the articles.

 

Venture in Social Marketing, Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager

The other reason I started working on this project (apart from my vision to share my valuable curated content) was to try my hands on Social Media marketing, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Those three are something that my work in an agency has prevented me from trying. I've never worked on social media marketing before as I was attracted to other opportunities in my company, while our work has a limited view of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

So I decided to use this project as a stepping stone to learning these vital digital marketing skills.

I've used Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to promote traffic to my site.

I've found that Facebook worked best to drive traffic to my site. I ran some creative tests and found some very interesting creative insights on the different markets I ran in. Overall the performance from Facebook was good and I got over 1000 likes after one month of intense work.

Instagram was a fun experience to build all those creatives, but I had trouble sustaining and retaining the followers. The same thing happened on Twitter, though the common denominator for these two is the lack of effort I put in.

Google Analytics was easy to implement after completing my Google Analytics certification in one week, while Google Tag Manager was very new to me.

After finishing the fundamentals course and reading some in-depth guides, I've managed to use Google Tag Manager to implement some goals into my website that is trackable via Google Analytics.

 

Future Plans + Ideal Scenario

This project is currently on a hiatus. While I intend to continue this project in the future, there is one thing that takes a lot of time to do.

That is summarising the articles.

I want to provide value to users by not just sharing the articles, but to provide a quick-read summary for the users and recommending a relevant book to continue their learning journey.

However, finding the right book is hard and summarising is even harder. It takes about an hour to finish an article.

An hour might not seem a lot, but it takes my time away from learning other things.

I intend to automate this process and I'm always on the lookout for any new breakthrough is text summarisation and recommendation technology. I'm hoping that one day I can build them on Python and share them with everyone, including a better WhatARead.com