I’d like to introduce you all to a new website I’ve created called DesignFutz. I’ve created this site in response to a few criticisms and issues that have cropped up over the course of Humble Homes’ growth.
Humble Homes was originally intended to act as a platform from which visitors could purchase my tiny house designs. Over time, the blog became more popular than the house plans, and the range of topics extended to include all manner of projects; some of which area neither a home nor humble.
Back in September, you may have noticed the website was either inaccessible or displaying incorrectly. Humble Homes had been creaking under the strain of visitor numbers for some time. Our server finally packed in around the 22nd of September, as you can see from the visitor numbers graph below. Whoops.
In response to the numerous “this house isn’t humble” comments, and the downtime experienced during September, I decided to take action. For the past few months I’ve been putting together the various parts of DesignFutz. It will now be home too all the projects that don’t fall under the umbrella of tiny houses. Soon, you’ll find existing non-tiny house posts will redirect you to designfutz.com – just a heads up.
I also took the opportunity to invest in a better host. DesignFutz is tailored to bring you a much better browsing experience. On the techie side of things, it runs on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) as opposed the shared hosting that Humble Homes uses. This, coupled with server side caching and a CDN, should result in much faster page loading (preliminary tests indicate the page load is a fraction of Humble Homes’).
Other less techie features include image galleries – yes, more than 5 images per post! And, because I’ve gone for a less idiosyncratic site name, DesignFutz will be home to a much broader range of architecture and design.
I haven’t taken the liberty of automatically signing people up to its newsletter. But, if you’d like to receive weekly updates from DesignFutz, you can sign up for it here. As always, your email won’t be shared with anyone. Ever.
On a final note, the website is still under development. There are a few bugs and display issues that I am aware of and working towards fixing. If you should happen to discover any, do drop me an email through the contact form.
All that’s left to say is, I wish you all a very happy 2017!
Niall,
im a fan of your page and i visit it almost daily, maybe those days without activity were because the page was down… i remembered it happens to me, but im not sure about the exactly date.
Your new page is cleaner and well organized, im sure it was a tremendous work to rearrange and select the projects.
Congrats, i really envy what you do.
Thank you Charo! I’ll admit there were a lot of evenings and weekends spent tweaking things, but it’s mostly done now (phew). I’ll eventually get around to fixing up Humble Homes as well. :)
Just a quick thanks and appreciation for all your work! I enjoy humble homes, $10,000 to $1,000,000! Keep doing what you enjoy and posting what you like, ignore the haters and thank you so much for sharing your passion for design with everyone!
Cheers Rob! Don’t worry, I’ll continue to post plenty of small/tiny homes and design ideas here on Humble Homes.
All I can say is I hope you continue your site. Our design aesthetics aren’t that far apart and I appreciate your vision and the fact that you have shared things that I would not have seen otherwise. I laugh at those who take issue with suggesting the material you present us on this site is wide of the mark or blog title since the trend on most small home sites seem to be moving from tiny to largest homes on wheels. If we revisit the earlier work of those founding tiny house designers like Jay Shafer, Michael Janzen and others and compare their evolving designs with what is so often offered up today, ie. homes that would require an eighteen wheeler to move, I find little to complain about with your offerings here. If I am remembering correctly, you were one of the first Tiny home designers I saw to offer a bed that slid under a raised portion of the main floor which now seems to have become one of several standard solutions for those of us who are no longer able to navigate a ladder or builtin staircase to a loft. Continue being a good tiny home designer and share your resources and images you find inspiring and to hell with the mouth-breathers who inhabit far too much internet real estate today. I will also sign up for you new site and seriously, thanks for all your work.
Hi John, I can’t help but agree with you – tiny houses do seem to be getting less tiny. Perhaps this is in recognition of the fact that very few people can make and live with what’s probably considered to be an extreme solution. I haven’t done any new tiny house designs in a few years now, but with the revising of the website, perhaps I’ll sit down and try to come up with something as inventive as the slide-out bed (although I think I peaked with that one haha). Thanks for all the kind words and stopping by every now and then. :)
thank you
Man…thank you for all the work you do.i just discovered your website and it inspires me sooo much.seriously,i go to bed and can find no sleep from all the exciting things i see in there haha!i really appreciate your work and will follow it closely.thanks again for the worth sleepless nights ;-)