Pixel2Life
Pixel2Life is one of the largest tutorial indexing websites on the web. In addition to having a huge variety of tutorials to choose from, it also offers other webmaster resources such as top sites, a message board and developer tools.
Tutorials
Pixel2Life currently has over 28,000 indexed tutorials, and many are added daily.
Pixel2Life has 85 tutorial categories for people to choose from. The categories range from Microsoft Word to PHP Coding and each category has a variety of sub-categories to choose from.
The site also has pages displaying the top 30 viewed tutorials as well as the top rated.
Updates
On the 12th July 2007, Pixel2life expectantly released updates to their site (a so called "V4"). While many of these updates are purely to the GUI, a great deal of effort has been made in this respect to make the overall user experience easier. New layout featured on the left
What's New?
The developers of Pixel2life have said they "took out the hedge trimmers" on this update. The driving force behind this move was to make the website less cluttered and hence easier to this, and this, arguably, they have achieved.
A number of improvements have been made to the site functions as well as a spattering of news ones. The most notable of which is the ability for authors of non-publishing system tutorials to edit their own details (such as the tutorial address) without having to contact the management.
The search feature has been simplified with the category drop down box removed. Instead, a search term is entered and a number of results displayed highlighting each category a result is found in enabling users to easily narrow down their search results.
Speed tweaks have also been implemented to reduce page load time. An already impressive load time came from the site with them making use of a page cache feature to load content faster, however with this update page size is said to be cut in half.
Another notable improvement is to the tutorial filtering options. The tutorials can now be filtered by date (e.g. 7 days, 30 days etc).
Publishing
Pixel2Life released a Publishing System on January 15th 2007 that allows users to write their own tutorials and have them hosted on Pixel2Life.com. The system has been created to allow adverts from Google Adsense (and later added) Oxado. The composer features a publisher bar, which has all the tools needed for writers to style their tutorials. It also features an image upload tool, allowing writers to upload screenshots and finished products, which are scaled down to fit with in the Pixel2Life layout.
The Community
Pixel2Life boasts an impressive forum with over 24,000 currently registered members and anywhere between 500-700 ACTIVE users at any one time. A number of forums ranging from graphics talk to coding help allows both users contributing to a topic and posting a topic to learn from it.
The "Tutorial Free-For-All" forum has recently been phased out for the newly developed publishing system
=== Staff === The site's administrators are Faken (Dan Richard's blog), Donna (13Dots), NGPixel, Ghost (TutorialFx), Chaos King, Adam and also the hard working moderators who keep the site free of spam and other abuse are Mr. Matt, Canen Art, Griffin, PSGirl, rc69, Shivmoo, dEcade and questionably Syntex
The staff diligently approves tutorials and most tutorials are approved within 5 to 7 days.
Site Rank
Netcraft: 14,960
Alexa: 7,571
Google Page Rank: 6