D&Co du Milieu 5th Anniversary

One more year of D&Co du Milieu! It’s the decorator’s birthday…

Five years have passed since August 12, 2016, when I opened the doors of D&Co du Milieu.

Today we blow out a fifth candle for a small website that has come a long way since its creation.

Before thinking about slashing the champagne and thanking the guests, I suggest – as usual – that you take a little tour of the past year and tackle some statistics!

→ Reminder : Our 5th Anniversary Contest is till running !

Contests

To celebrate this fifth birthday is also to look back on the 5 contests that took place this year: 2 Housing Week, 1 “Demeure de l’Étrange”, an anniversary contest, and the X-Creator competition.

Next year, these 5 contests will be back in more or less the same order and at the same times.

The Decorator’s Event Schedule is always there to give you an idea of ​​the competitions yet to take place before year’s end.

This will be a year rich in events!

Website

As usual, the site has seen some notable innovations in this past year to better adapt to your needs.

Last November, D&Co got a new haircut with version 6 of the website with a new calendar and a new design.
With version 6.2 in May, I totally reworked how posts were displayed inside archive/category pages so you can browse deco items more easily.
Update 6.3.1 also added a revamp of the Ambient Music display.

Finally, earlier this week, D&Co du Milieu was moved to new shiny servers and I hope you already noticed that the website was running much faster since! As always, I will continue to add things to the website and tweak what is already there in order to give you the best experience!

⇒ Discover here the latest updates to the website.

Database

D&Co du Milieu would not be what it is now without its famous decoration database.

Today, the site has logged exactly 1691 decorations, and after five years I finally reached the point where every single item from LotRO is now on D&Co du Milieu.

As usual, I will continue to update this database throughout the coming year, whether by updating old photos or adding information (price, categories, etc....).

Work on the database is never finished!

⇒ Discover here the latest updates to the database.

Let’s move on to the numbers!

Visits:

• 385 468 visits on D&Co this year (227 000 last year)
• 77 000 visits in August last year, a new record! (previous was 33 000 in July 2020)

The most visited “News”:

• Guide : An Introduction to LotRO Housing (2732 visits)
• Housing Week in Middle-Earth Contest #10 (2406)
• Blood of Azog (U30) - Housing Preview  (2004 visits)

The most viewed decoration items:

• Training Dummy Stand (637 views)
• Herbalist Table (635)
• Midsummer Stable (585)

My main suppliers* of visitors (French + English):
* 27% of total visits

• Lotro.com: 52% of my external visits come from the official web site.
• FibroJedi (blog): 20%, thanks to Fibro for sharing this blog!
• Twitter / Facebook: 17%, many thanks to all of you social media followers!
• LesFuretsDuGondor + LotRO JeuxOnLine: 6%. A big thank you to you, Khalès & Edward!

2020/2021 Contests:

• 5 contests this year (X-Creator + 2 Housing Week Contests + 1 “Demeures de l’Étrange” + 1 Anniversary Contest)
• More than 260 participants (190 last year)
• 16 500 LotRO Points distributed (14 000 last year)
• 19 Best House trophies distributed this year!
• 1 War of the Three Peaks Xpac distributed
• And a dozen of other items (titles, pets, mounts...)!

Thank You!

Finally, I wanted to thank all the people who continue to help this website thrive, including all the visitors, commenters, contest participants, and people who share the work done here. A huge thank you to you all!

Thanks to the entire team at SSG and especially Cordovan, Baccata, Tybur and Scenario for their time, help and support and for the Q&A last week.
Thanks to my "Translation Team", Rhuangar, Haflith, and Khelsi for their invaluable help in translating complex posts for D&Co.
Finally, thanks to Edward, Kaels and Prunaprismia for accompanying me in judging the various competitions!

Thanks everyone and Happy Birthday to D&Co du Milieu!

→ Reminder : Our 5th Anniversary Contest is till running !

~Yao
D&Co du Milieu