Many great things have happened in Zeemp website in 2009. In this post, we are going to sum up what have kept us busy throughout the year, show you our mistakes, achievements and what we learned from your valuable feedback and comments. By the way, thanks a lot for all the support you’ve been giving us since we launch, we wouldn’t achieve anything without your help.

Before 2009

Before 2009, I used to spend countless hours on Web Design galleries and Architecture websites, I was addicted to discovering beautiful websites and great architectural projects. My partner Paulo Augusto (my brother) had dropped out the college of Law because he used to spend hours drawing in his notebook instead of learning the laws in classroom. My other partner (my father) had been fired after working more than 20 years in a public institution.

Then, I and my partners thought that the next logical step for us was: “We have got to do something for the Web” – But we didn’t want to launch just more one website, we wanted something that could reflect our personal visions and ambitions for a better world. As I told you we love Architecture and Design, then we realized that we could use the hundred of sketches of houses, cities and buildings we’ve been designing for years to build something cool. Zeemp was born with the main purpose of showcasing the best websites on Web on a city web map.

In November 2008, we wrote our first blog post Zeemp blog launch to show people what we’ve been doing. In December 2009, we wrote 10 Outstanding Website Designs, so we could show people some great sites that had inspired us.

January

In January, we launched our beta version. We were lucky enough to receive a lot of quality and sincere feedback from you, so we could keep improving our code and interface.

April

We removed the Beta label and launched Zeemp 1.0.

May

Instead of charging people to join, we decided to showcase the greatest websites in Internet on our Web Map.

July

We wrote two interesting posts in July:

10 Beautiful Websites for your Inspiration

12 Useful Web Apps to Get Feedback

August

How the future will look like?

Trying to answer this question, I wrote 40 Awesome Futuristic City Illustrations that went viral on Stumbleupon and Twitter. This post has reached 70,000 pageviews.

September

Following our passion for Architecture, we published a post about The New World Trade Center in New York and another that showcases real amazing projects being built all over the world: Stunning Real Urban Designs.

October

In October, we collected some great illustrations for your inspiration: 100 Wonderful Battle Art Illustrations and 60 Beautiful Oriental Style Artworks.

December

We are redesigning and redeveloping our Zeemp Map and Zeemp Blog, so we created a launching soon page and collected some useful tips all over the Web for you in the post Designing A Coming Soon Page.

Zeemp was a showcase of websites, but we thought we could be implement it with more social features. So you will be able to share, review and become fan of the brands you love.

Zeemp Traffic

We want to show you the results of your precious help, so we collected some cool data for you. This illustration shows our monthly traffic data in Zeemp.com in 2009.

Zeemp Blog Traffic

Traffic on Zeemp Blog have been growing massively since we begin to post some cool inspirational posts and showcases. As you can see, we reached 83,065 pageviews this year with only 14 blog posts. They have received a total of 129 great comments. We have got 20 subscribers via RSS and email, a tiny number, but it reflects one of my biggest mistakes this year: posting just once per month. A mistake that will be avoided at all costs in 2010, we want to publish at least 15 posts per month.

Zeemp Social Activity

We post interesting stuff in our social networks accounts, it will be a pleasure to connect with you.

Twitter Followers – 193 – Follow us

Facebook Fans – 91 – Become fan

What are your big plans for 2010?

We would love to hear your goals and ideas.

Our team never stops trying new ideas on Zeemp Website. So we thought it would be cool to showcase the best stuff of the Web on our interactive map.

We selected 40 pleasant websites for categories like Web Design, Online Marketing, Internet Services, Music, Games, Social Networking and more.

Please, don’t hesitate to suggest us cool websites, so we can build together the creative map of the Web monthly. You can submit your own website too for free on Zeemp page.

Today we’re announcing that we removed the beta label from Zeemp website. We have been hard at work improving the navigation and performance of the site.

Zeemp.com is the creative web map, we collect websites that are useful and have a pleasant experience for each category of our web map. There are forty categories to choose in the front page (10 active,  we will launch the rest soon). If you liked or not our old front page, now you’ll love it. Following your great improvements ideas, we designed a new page.

Before you had to use a drop down menu to find things, now you just have to click a business category that you like to find great services.

Take a look in the new design versus the old one.

Our beta version did not have a tagline in the front page to explain what Zeemp does, so we added it.

We added 5 new categories into a new city zone. We also added the great service Addthis to our front page, so you can tell your friends about us. And we boosted the performance of the site using great tools like Yslow and Dojotoolkit modular architecture and amazing build system.  Zeemp page is 3 times faster now.

We believe that the city map metaphor works because it stimulates you to discover things by exploration, you can playfully find cool products and services in Zeemp virtual city map the same way you do when searching for a place, street or a restaurant in a real city map.  Additionally, for each category available in the site, you have got the power to compare and choose the website that best fits your needs.

Unfortunately, Opera browser is not supported yet. But we are working hard to solve this. So feel free to contact us anytime, we love to hear comments or suggestions. Thanks!