Iconshock interview: Hongkiat Lim

Surely, if you are a designer you know who this guy is. Hongkiat.com has become a home away from home for millions of designers and artists looking for top quality tutorials and resources. His work has been a constant inspiration for web entrepreneurs and his story has been featured in countless articles around the blogosphere. Developersnippets, Creativenerds, Bloggingtips and many more have listed Hongkiat among the best websites in the web. As busy as he might be, it surprised me that he was very kind and accessible, always eager to answer our questions and help us out. This is the guy every blogger wants to be; Constant, dedicated and talented. Another big net celebrity featured by Iconshock so our dear readers can get inspired. Dreams can be made one blog at the time and Hongkiat Lim is a real example.

1. Who is Hongkiat Lim?

Hongkiat Lim, that's me ;) I'm a Mac enthusiast, designer, web developer and a blogger. I'm also both a Malaysia citizen and Singapore permanent resident. I travel between these two countries very often.

2. What is Hongkiat.com?

Hongkiat.com started off as a small personal blog where I shared my personal interested and design-related stuff.   As readerships start to grow steadily over time, I began to notice it's potential rooms for improvement and growth, therefore I swapped it's direction and turned it into what it is today - information and resource sites for designers and bloggers.

3. Is Hongkiat.com your full time job or do you do other stuff?

Hongkiat.com is my full time job, but apart from that I also do web design, web development and consultation.

4. How much time did it take for Hongkiat.com to be self sustainable?

It took me about 3 months to get the site to be totally self-sustainable; that means the revenue from the site can happily take care of all domain cost, hosting fees and other miscellaneous expenses.

5. First three things you do everyday.

Get my favorite coffee from Starbucks, check  e-mails and read RSS feeds.

6. The last three.

Plan and accomplish certain milestone for blog entries, read my design magazines and kiss my wife good night.

7. Where does Hongkiat.com revenue come from?

Most of Hongkiat.com income comes from advertisements; direct banner ads, Cost Per-thousand Impression (CPM) ads and Pay Per Click (PPC) ads.

8. In your opinion, Which are the very first steps that a blog has to take to get noticed and become sustainable?

Be unique, write quality contents and have faith in what you do and do not give up easily.

9. Biggest blunder to date.

It happened on 26th of June 2007. Hongkiat.com was hacked and defaced. Database was deleted too. It was one of the biggest impact that have ever hit me and the site. I was lucky to have a backup with my web host. Everything was restored in couple of hours time.

10. What are you going to do on December holidays?

I'm going to spend this Christmas staying at home, watching movies, do some cooking and hopefully I can master a new dish :-)