The year 2024 was a year of change, growth and innovation for our in-house project TutKit.com. In a review of the year, we would like to share the highlights and challenges that our small but powerful team of 13 people overcame.
Multilingualism as a mammoth project
The start of the year was marked by our biggest technical project to date: the introduction of multilingualism. In an internal memo on June 7, 2023, I identified multilingualism as the most important goal since the relaunch of TutKit.com in 2021, and possibly even the most important project in our company's history. After months of preparation, we transitioned the changes from development to the live environment on January 31, 2024. The goal was to create a seamless language experience that would give natives the impression that the portal was actually originally run by people in their local language. So our solution had to be perfect. After seven months of work, we were eager to finally bring multilingualism online at the end of January 2024.
If you ask ChatGPT how many commits are included in a merge in Git on average, you'll get the answer that it varies. Small projects get 1-10 commits and large open source projects often get dozens to hundreds as they merge many contributions.
Our merge included 1,837 commits. We activated our maintenance page and prepared ourselves for having to fix problems for hours. However, the merge went almost without a hitch and was completed within ten minutes. Impressive.
However, the challenges were not long in coming. Translations via API to Deepl and OpenAI caused problems: from inappropriate text lengths because there was not enough space in the UI, to incorrect quotation marks, to broken links or strong texts that caused strange spaces. With systematic approaches such as the introduction of short links at backend level and automated quality checks, we were able to successfully overcome these hurdles. That sounds easier said than done. Anyone who takes multilingualism seriously will encounter numerous problems. I have already given a small insight into this in my NOERD presentation, but I will write a larger article in 2025 on how complex and challenging the topic of multilingualism can be and where the 10 to 20 problems lie that all those who are serious about it need to solve.
Our Jens, our brightest mind and project manager, said at the beginning of the year that the topic would be with us for a whole year. He was right. It was only last week that further functions for problem solving went online. In desktop publishing, this would be called final artwork, which we have implemented at code level. This is exactly the kind of function we implement for our translations, because the AI doesn't always do what you want it to.
With multilingualism also came performance problems. An issue that probably only a few people have on their agenda. We therefore worked on cleaning up our technical debit and PageSpeed: CSS and JS refactoring as well as optimized database queries brought the speed of our internationally oriented platform back to an excellent level. Today, we are proud to operate one of the fastest multilingual platforms on the Internet.
Content creation: from mockups to DIY and tutorials
Another highlight of the year was the enormous amount of content production. Although our focus was fully on our multilingual work, we still published 49 new products for our flat rate customers.
In addition to the flat rate and individual purchase, we also introduced a third purchase option: the all-in-one lifetime model - pay once, always have access. A very fair offer for the variety of content we offer. We're even running a discount campaign at the moment ...
Over 1,600 mockups were created to visualize our application templates . An entire content hub for job applications and CVs went online, supplemented by hundreds of job templates and topic-specific blog posts.
A special content sprint made it possible to exploit the content of video tutorials, which were converted into text tutorials using automated processes and published in 26 languages. These measures not only increased our visibility, but also laid the foundation for significantly improving the user experience for our foreign website visitors by providing them with text-based translations of German videos with matching screenshots from the video. This enabled us to triple the number of clicks in the text tutorials section alone within three months. As the text tutorials contain many B2B topics, a seasonal decline can now be seen during the Christmas period. From January, we are confident that we will pick up the trend again and celebrate new records in this area on a weekly basis
Diversification: less reliance on Google
The August core update from Google brought a brief drop in our clicks, which can be seen in the chart one image higher. It made it clear to us at the time that we needed to diversify our traffic sources.
Our designers created over 3,500 additional mockups for our design templates, which we now use to visualize our pins on Pinterest. We have four channels there in English, Spanish, German and Romanian, each with 3,500 pins relating to our design assets. Further language channels will follow in 2025. All pins are in the respective language with matching emojis etc. Everything is very nicely solved via the Pinterest API, so that we can automatically create the pins on Pinterest from the portal.
We have also introduced a new content format on TutKit.com, which we can use on various platforms: DIY tutorials. Lovingly created videos about origami and handicrafts show how you can get creative in an analog way. This content is available as video and text tutorials on our portal, but also on our specially created YouTube channel, which reached its first 1000 subscribers this morning. The focus is clearly on content that cannot simply be replaced by AI.
Here is a video from the channel:
An extraordinary team with big goals
The past year has been characterized by technical innovations, tireless content production and a clear focus on internationalization. Today we can look back on over 150,000 URLs in a total of 26 languages. We have been extremely busy. At the beginning of the year, we were only available in German with 1,800 subpages. Now each language variant contains over 5,000 subpages with useful content for our website visitors.
If I take the last three months and compare them with last year, I see a twenty-fold increase in our clicks.
Due to our multilingualism, you might think this increase is normal. The success of our work becomes even clearer if I limit the measurement results purely to the German URLs.
We were able to achieve a tenfold increase in clicks, a fivefold increase in impressions and a significant improvement in the average click rate and position for our German-language pages. A great success for us.
Behind these successes is a team that works with passion, discipline and creativity. Every contribution counts, and together we have shown that even a small team like ours can achieve extraordinary results. Here is my team - the best I have ever had the pleasure of working with. I am proud of each and every one of them!
The screenshot shows our Christmas call. Frankly, this was the second ever call at the end of the working year where we all got together. One thing we have done away with is regular meetings with everyone. There are still daily meetings - but only at task level with the people involved in each case. In this respect, the abolition of mandatory meetings was one of the biggest productivity hacks we introduced. Speaking of productivity ... here's a statistic to finish with: In JIRA, our project management tool, an average of 14 tickets per working day were created for TutKit.com in 2024 , which were solely for our dev team. Although there are still a few hundred open, this figure shows very clearly how ambitious and focused we were in developing our portal this year.
We are proud of what we have achieved and look forward to the big goals that lie ahead of us in 2025. Anything is possible - thanks to this special team, which is exceptionally creative, smart and disciplined.