I made this The Sims 2 blog in 2009, originally as ONE page, its URL was teoalida.webs.com/thesims.htm.
Since August 2012 I made a new website www.teoalida.com to replace the crappy Webs.com one, and The Sims 2 section was a Category with 30+ pages.
After adding non-gaming stuff on teoalida.com in November-December 2012 , I decided in February 2013 to give to The Sims 2 a sub-website instead of a category, URL remained the same: www.teoalida.com/thesims!
The entire www.teoalida.com have a total traffic of 300 daily visitors in early 2013 and rising to 1000 daily visitors as May 2015. Of them, this The Sims sub-website contributed with about 20 daily visitors in 2013 (quite few) and even worse, started falling slowly due to lack of updates. It’s probably because of competition, there are too many The Sims 2 blogs on the internet and too few players searching on google willing to read blogs of other players.
During 2018 due to change in google algorithms, many subpages of my website jumped in traffic, and since I decided in November 2018 to publish list of lots in all The Sims 1, 2, 3 neighborhoods and worlds, the traffic on The Sims sub-website exceeded 100 daily visitors.
In March-April 2020 during Coronavirus pandemic, kids staying home as schools were closed and adults who lost jobs started playing games and looking for info about The Sims, making my The Sims ection of my website to reach about 800 visitors/day (that’s about 30% of total website traffic of about 2500 visitors/day.
List of website updates and changes
April 2009
I started my personal website: teoalida.webs.com, a 10-page website of which ONE page was dedicated for The Sims 2. Beside the planned cities that I made in 2006-2008, I made in rush 3 houses: Small wood home, L-shaped medium house, The Palace, and presented all them on website.
The Sims 2 page had 8 paragraphs.
2009-2011
Little time dedicated to gaming.
November 2011
added 2 new houses: Best Starter Home and Tiny Lot house, both on 1×2 lots. Added game pros & cons.
December 2011
I installed Apartment Life, I added one functional apartment block, one decorative condo, Tips and Tricks.
February 2012
Added Guide for an efficient house, A different kind of house, Funny screenshots.
February-May 2012
Work, work, work… too busy to play any game.
June-July 2012
I dedicated some time for gaming, I installed all remaining expansion packs and planned to built about 6 more house downloads, beside the 8 existing houses.
I decided to post one new house per week, to please Google. However, until August I posted 8 house downloads and I had another 4 houses on waiting list, while the page already reached 25 paragraphs (of which 16 houses) and 60+ KB in size. Too much!
I had an idea to split it in at least 3 pages: TheSims2.htm for gaming review, TheSims2lots.htm, TheSims2tricks.htm.
Pleasing Google failed. The Sims 2 page got only 2-3 daily visitors.
Meantime the total number of visitors on my website reached 200+ daily visitors, too much for a Webs.com free hosting.
August 2012
I started a new website on teoalida.com using WordPress and paid hosting and decided to start testing it by posting The Sims 2 stuff, as it is the poorest-performing page in Google of the former 50-pages website teoalida.webs.com.
24 September 2012
teoalida.webs.com/thesims2.htm has been deleted! All content has been moved to www.teoalida.com!
Meantime I kept building new houses, as 24 September I have 40 posts scheduled to be published one per day until end of september, plus plans for even more houses!!
October 2012
INCREDIBLE! I have 53 posts in The Sims 2 category, of which 36 are houses made by me!
Nov 2012 – most of 2013
Work, work, work > no time for playing games.
February 2013
The Sims 2 fan page was converted into a separate blog (sub-website) instead of being a category on my main website www.teoalida.com which is now only about real-life housing. URL remained the same: www.teoalida.com/thesims. I will post more houses and useful stuff when I will have time.
March 2013
I started playing The Sims 3, which I installed since January but had no time to play. new houses will be posted on website SOON!
Growing business forced me to stop playing games, leaving several The Sims houses under construction, or finished but unpublished.
August-October 2013
All images, previously hosted on Photobucket to reduce bandwidth usage of extremely-limited bandwidth of the former website on Webs.com hosting, have been gradually re-uploaded to my own website’s hosting (www.teoalida.com/thesims/images/…).
2014-2015
Did not played any The Sims these years.
March 2015
I moved the website from Shared server to a Virtual Private Server.
May 2015
The move to VPS screwed Simple eCommerce plugin for WordPress which I was using in other websites to sell my works. I started looking for other plugins and found Easy Digital Downloads.
Then I came with idea to use Easy Digital Downloads also for The Sims section of website, even if the plugin is intended for paid downloads and personally I use it mostly for lot / house downloads for FREE (products with $0.00 price). This allow me better tracking of how many times each house is downloaded, but also if a person download multiple houses.
Previously I was tracking house downloads having the files uploaded in Hotfile.com, could see which are most downloaded but not who download them and if someone download multiple house (until Hotfile hosting service was suspended by US government for piracy), also tracking website visitors with Clicky, but since Clicky do not track .sims2pack files, I improvised something by uploading files on my old website (teoalida.webs.com) but since this hosting is limited to 80 MB storage, I uploaded all except 4 houses (biggest file sizes), and Clicky was tracking them as external links.
June 2016
After few years in which I focused on expanding my business, I returned in The Sims and built 6 skyscrapers and also re-started working at StarlingSprings apartment town.
June 2017
I finished StarlingSprings urban city!
November 2018
I published 23 pages with the list of lots from each world (previously available in Excel format only, for $23, made since 2013).
December 2018
I made a table with list of neighborhoods in The Sims 1 too.
March 2019
I made a table with list of neighborhoods in The Sims 2 too (14 neighborhoods).
December 2019
I made a database with The Sims 3 career tracks.
April 2020
I made a database with The Sims 4 career tracks.
