Um... how are there only four days until 2017?! I know I say it a lot and everyone else says it a lot too but I legitimately cannot believe this year is so close to being over. It went so fast! With a lot of ups and some downs, it's been a pretty awesome year. This was my first "full" year blogging (I started mid January 2015) and the growth I've seen in my blog, myself and my attitude toward my blog have changed drastically. When I sat down to brainstorm for this post, I went back and read my 2015 year in review and I was actually surprised at the growth I saw in 2015; the way my blog has grown this year completely overtakes what I saw in my first year of blogging and it's been incredible. From the support of friends and family to the friendships I've made with bloggers to the engagement on blog posts that I couldn't have imagined, it's been *so* amazing and I can't wait for such growth to happen again (and more so - fingers crossed!) in 2017.
I'm also adding in my very first readers survey at the bottom of this post (thanks to Summer from Coffee With Summer for the inspiration to make a readers survey!)! I would so appreciate you taking just a minute or two to fill this out. It'd mean the world!! :)
As 2015 is quickly coming to a close, so is my first year of being a blogger. It's so crazy to me to think that a year ago to the very moment I was beginning to gather my ideas and thoughts and thinking, "I really want to start a blog". It all stemmed from a few things: wanting something new in my life that was important to me, missing being super active on Tumblr, and even seeing some blogging friends (from my big Tumblr days) upgrading to blogs like these. I start looking around at other blogs and trying to work my way into the blogging world and as 2015 rolled around, I found myself brainstorming blog names and trying to make all of the big decisions that up and coming bloggers have to make.
In New York, we had a ridiculously cold and snowy winter so in the first two weeks of January that blog planning was in full swing for me, I had an endless number of snow days that I sat in front of the fire place with my laptop, fuzzy socks and hot chocolate for hours on end doing everything I could to get ready for my anticipated launch day - January 12th. Thanks to my mom's help, I had come up with my blog's name and then came all of the hard parts that took much more than I ever expected (I seriously LOL at myself looking back at how naive I was about all of this!)
Once I made my first ever banner, picked one of Blogger's free themes and made some sidebar titles, I put up my semi-customized theme that I had spent days working on, on January 11th and then on January 12th, I posted Daily Dose of Design's very first blog post! It was just an introduction post, but I was so proud to have had it up and running.
The next thing I asked myself was - where's all my views? I mean, I just posted an introduction post so why aren't random people finding my blog, reading my post and welcoming me?! It's kind of hard to believe just how naive I was...
