Interview with Manoela Ilic

You are kind of a mysterious person. Maybe could you introduce yourself?

I’m Manoela, a 31 year old web designer and developer and I create things for Codrops since 2009. I studied Cognitive Science in Germany and then Computational Logic in Portugal.

I worked in a software company for a while before I decided to become a freelancer and launch Codrops. Since I was a kid I was always fascinated with computers and I created my first website when I was 16 (it had some fancy Flash buttons, I remember) :)

In my personal life I like to travel a lot (in fact, most of the time I am travelling). I love to eat and make good food, drink a great wine and take care of my balcony herb garden whenever I have some spare time.

Could you tell us a little bit more about Codrops? Where did the idea came from and what do you do for it?

I set up a WordPress blog in late 2009 thinking that I could share some useful snippets with fellow developers. I was doing some beginner mobile web development back then and I just wanted to share what I learnt and what I thought could be helpful. Snippets turned into tutorials over time and now Codrops turned into an almost full-time job :)

What I do is to plan, design, implement and write tutorials together with my partner Pedro. I also manage the blog and review articles by our writers.

Why did you choose to land on Wordpress? Who did the development (CSS, scripts and stuff)?

WordPress seemed like the most fitting blog engine at the time and I’ve been happy with it ever since. I love the community around it. All the development and implementation was done by me and Pedro.

What is the biggest challenge at Codrops?

I guess the most challenging but also most exciting part is to come up with interesting and original ideas and concepts that are somehow inspiring and helpful to web designers and developers. At Codrops we try to provide ideas and new perspectives that serve as a source of inspiration. So we always create a story for what we want to show and setting up that story is the most delicate part.

Sounds lovely. If you could go back and change something at Codrops, what would it be?

There are always things that could be done better when looking back. But in general I am quite happy with how Codrops turned out thanks to our readers and I wouldn’t want to change anything about that I guess. It’s just like with everything else in life: if you wouldn’t have done it that exact way, you might have not learned what you know now. And if you are happy with what you’ve learned, it probably was a good path to choose.

What do you plan for the future of Codrops?

There are many things that we want to add to and improve at Codrops. We are currently working on some new sections that we want to release this year. And we are of course planning to do more tutorials and provide more articles that will be interesting and useful to our readers.

Could you share a few datas about the site maybe? Traffic, authors, anything surprising?

We currently have about 850.000 unique visitor and 9.5 million pageviews every month. Our readers spend an average of 4.25 minutes on Codrops and they view about 6 pages per visit. Almost half of them are from the United States. We have 512 published posts and more than 20.000 comments. In total, we have 45 authors, most of whom were guest authors with a single contribution.

What is the most successful article on Codrops so far? Related to the number of views.

The most successful article was Original Hover Effects by Alessio Atzeni.

Do you have any side project? What would you like to do if you had enough time?

Yes, I have some side projects that I’m working on and I also work for some clients. If I had more time I would definitely spend it all on answering our reader’s questions and help them with their problems.

Anything left you’d like to say? :)

I’d like to thank you for the opportunity and I’d like to thank all the readers of Codrops for their support. I’d also like to wish you all the best for your website and blog and I’m looking forward to read many of your articles :)

Well, thank you very much for your time Manoela! Wish you the best for both your work at Codrops and your personal life. Oh, and congratulations for being part of the 2013 Awwwards jury! :)