Vitaly Friedman is the co-founder of Smashing Magazine, currently one of the most popular blogs in the world. Smashing Magazine is an ongoing collection of high-quality resources and tutorials for web developers, designers, and bloggers. We caught up with Vitaly who has been very busy migrating the site to a server that can handle all their traffic. Vitaly also wrote a nice thank you note to everyone who’s been a fan that I’d like to share:
Hi, Shaun,
First of all, thank you very much for your time and your interest in our magazine. We really appreciate it. In fact, it means a lot for us - me, Vitaly Friedman, Sven Lennartz and Christiane Rosenberger. Sven and I founded the Smashing Magazine in September 2006, but already now it’s simply amazing to observe that we’ve managed to help thousands of people find the information they were actually looking for.
Therefore we’d like to thank to everybody who bookmarked, digged, mentioned, linked, or passed on information about us over the last few months. Since the beginning of the year we’ve already counted over 3,000,000 site impressions and we’ve achieved 366th rank in the worldwide Technorati Ranking. Basically it is the reason why we had to move to a new server now - many readers complained about 503 Internal Server Error, caused by huge traffic we’ve got after Digg effects and other “effects”. We hope, now the server will be more stable.
Anyway, we’re smashed. Really. But - of course - it doesn’t mean that we won’t smash you again! 
Yes, it’s fun to get smashed, but I usually regret it the next morning… ok, enough bad jokes. On to the questions…
Name, Age, and when you sleep at night you dream about what?
My name is Vitaly Friedman; I am 22 years old and I am studying computer science at the University of Saarland, Germany. Usually I don’t really have much time to sleep, but when I do sleep, I dream about something I can’t remember at the morning, so… I guess, this doesn’t answer your question.
How long have you been working as a Web designer/developer and what’s the most important thing you’ve learned about the business in that time?
I started to learn the basics of Web design / development at the end of the 90s; I used very basic HTML tags and table layouts a lot then. Now everything is different. What had completely changed my interests was the basic idea that you can present your ideas, thoughts and feelings in the way you determine to be right.
… in other words, you have complete control over the way your ideas are presented?
It’s more amazing than it actually sounds. The possibility of presenting something to a broad public worldwide was absolutely amazing for me then.
We, humans, are different and it’s a good thing; but we also should appreciate our differences and respect each other. This may sound trivial, but it is really essential - in our basic human interaction and communication as well as in web design.
The idea that we respect and understand each other’s differences, is quite simple, however it determines the way the work and communcation process with clients is framed. It also determines the way we work and communicate with our readers on Smashing.
So, basically, I’ve learned that you should respect and trust your visitors, be honest with them and communicate with them.
You started out collecting links on another popular site you founded called Web Developer’s Handbook (which now has a great new look). Did the concept for Smashing Magazine grow out of that project?
Not really. Although the basic idea behind both projects is the same. You see, what I created with Web Developer’s Handbook was an organized collection of references one should always have ready to hand developing web-sites. Smashing Magazine goes a slightly different road - we find some topic we’re excited about and search in the Web for professional references or solutions for given problems.
In fact, we put a lot of thinking in before posting every single article. We try to provide what we personally understand to be quality material. We present information which we ourselves would like to bookmark once it appears online. Ironically, if I am looking for something in the Web, I go to Smashing magazine myself, because it’s handy to keep all the useful stuff in one place.
Smashing Magazine posts extensive themed-related collections of links each week. What drives your choice of each theme?
Mostly that are just problems we have and solutions we find during design process (my case) or publishing new articles in Dr. Web (Sven’s case). As I’ve mentioned before, it’s nice to have useful references in one single place. For instance, collecting information for the post “83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen” had cost us a lot of time, but now I don’t have to Google any more if I am looking for some beautiful Wordpress theme. Doing something for yourself and presenting it then to the public is simple, but it can be very useful - in our case particularly for web-developers. Actually, I was just looking for some useful stuff for a web-project I am working on right now.
So our basic aim is to help web-developers get the information they are actually looking for. We want to make sure that the valuable information we have, collect, or stumble upon is available for people who might actually use it for their creative works.
It takes many hours of hard work to write the articles which are already published. All resources are hand-picked and selected manually. We want to achieve the highest quality content and present it to a broad audience.
Do you use any tools to organize your links outside of WDH and Smashing Magazine? Why do you use those tools over similar ones?
Mostly I use tools I’ve written myself. It helps me to write articles in both English and German in a more efficient way.
Smashing Magazine consists of you and Sven. Why have you chosen to work together? Do you have separate responosibilities?
Don’t forget Christiane Rosenberger! She is being very helpful and she is really good in differentiating between best quality and average quality content as well as finding useful tools and resources.
[Ed: Sorry, Christiane, for that hole in my research!]
Indeed, we have separate responsibilities, however we write together and we exchanges the ideas for posts almost every day.
It seems to me you must spend a lot of time weeding through your finds and gathering only the best quality content. How much time do you generally spend per day sifting the “wheat from the chaff” so to speak? Do you actually try out each programming and design tutorial, and if not, how can you tell if it’s high quality or not?
It depends. Since I am observing what is happening on the Web, sometimes it’s not so difficult to keep up with the good stuff. You just have to know what’s been useful before, how it was done and what appears now. However, some articles require time and patience - still every bookmark, every digg, every comment we get for our work is definitely worth it.
Of course, we don’t try out every tutorial we’re writing about. But we visit every resource which we consider for publishing in our articles and check out its functionality. The choice is sometimes subjective, however often you need to look at something from your personal perspective. Again, take a look at the most popular Wordpress themes and 83 Themes presented in our recent article. The wisdom of crowds is useful and very important, but therefore your personal input is essential as never before.
Many factors play an important role in our links selection - but the main aspect is its practical value - we want to make sure that the resources we link to are really useful for web-developers.
What do you like to do outside of Web Developer’s Handbook and Smashing Magazine?
There are many projects going on at the moment. I am designing few web sites, but I still study at the university and I am still working as a freelancing journalist and I am also working on some secret project I’m not allowed to tell about and I am driving from Saarbruecken to Bonn and Cologne on weekends, where my lovely girlfriend lives. So, yes, there are many things I do outside WDH and Smashing Magazine.
What’s the next new technology you’re excited about?
Probably the one I have never heard about before. I am looking forward to see what CSS 3, Ajax, Microformats and Semantic Web will achieve in the future.
Thanks Vitaly, for your time today, and for all your work on Smashing Magazine.
