It’s my tremendous honour to share that this February marks 10 years of articles on this website, and it’s still going as strong as ever. In celebration, I invite you to join me in looking back at the site’s history, some its achievements, and the content that has made it so popular (with a Top 10 Most Popular Articles list to follow!).

But first, thank you to all the very many readers who have encouraged me to keep going over such a long period! I couldn’t keep it up without you.

As a bonus, for the whole month of February all the ELB eBooks are 50% off in the store!

A Brief History of English Lessons Brighton

I created this website in 2012 to begin promoting local tutoring services in Brighton. Yet it’s 10 years ago, February 2023, that marks the point where I started sharing articles. I was answering questions for my students that I couldn’t find discussed elsewhere online, so I decided to share my own findings here – and the site took off.

At first, I was writing at least one article a week, which helped the site get picked up on search engines, and though I eventually slowed down, I have consistently released at least one new article and newsletter every month ever since.

The result, so far, is 259 published articles on the site, all of which you can find through various links on the Learn Online page.

Somehow, in the early days, it was my English tenses timeline that really started to get noticed. This would later help encourage the idea for The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide, though I ultimately felt the timeline itself was flawed, and it doesn’t actually feature in the book!

It wasn’t long before I started producing books to accompany the website, and I owe a lot to the support and feedback I received from learners and teachers who had visited ELB and agreed to read samples (alongside, it must be said, the support and feedback received from my wonderful wife). The site never really sold many books itself (that was a whole other journey, which you can read about here), but it gave me invaluable support in the creation of those books. There are now 4 out, 3 of which have been Amazon Bestsellers.

Over the years, ELB continued to receive plenty of visits from search engines and people sharing the links, or from teachers sharing material with students. It far outdid two other websites I made at the time, one for creative writing and one for commercial writing, with the result that though I closed those sites some years ago, this one is still going.

The website now feels like a bit of an unlikely relic from internet’s past, though, as a personal site designed to share my own ideas about English quirks, not a commercial project (I’ve got ads for my own books up, but this site is not responsible for many sales, and I’ve never entertained third-party advertiser requests!).

10 years ago, your internet searches might have brought up any number of personal sites like this, but now it feels hard to spot any, with search engines flooded by commercial content. With that in mind, I feel it’s a minor miracle ELB is still drawing in large numbers of visitors after 10 years, and I hope it will continue to do so, for as long as it can…

ELB in Numbers

As I’ve already mentioned, this website has been going for 10 years with 259 articles currently published. Across those articles, we have about 1675 comments posted (including some hot debates about language usage) and thousands of subscribers to the blog and newsletter.

Going just by WordPress’s statistics, which may be somewhat inaccurate, we have had over 6 million page views. The most views in a day was 4,471 (about a year ago), and on average I have seen some 2,000 – 3,500 views every day for a good part of those 10 years. It’s declined over the past couple of years, and perhaps peaked around 2019.

Though book sales have been rather peripheral to the site itself, we’re at about 40,000 copies of ELB books sold worldwide; Word Order in English Sentences has sold over 15,000 copies and The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide over 10,000, with Advanced Writing Skills for Students of English likely to cross 10,000 sales this year! All 3 books have been Kindle bestsellers in various categories, and at one point Word Order was one of the bestselling grammar eBooks on Amazon for over a year!

But the real meat of the site is in the articles themselves, which are daily reaching thousands of people all over the world. So what exactly are they all here for?

What are the 10 Most Popular Articles?

The most popular articles on the site often surprise me, because I usually just post what’s on my mind and don’t set out to do something the search engines will like. I’ve written some bumper articles that I hoped would get seen more, such as my complete word order guide and my growing phrasal verbs guide and list, but these aren’t typically the ones that people find.

That said, my guide to different language varieties has proved very popular, but has not been around long enough to compete with some of the articles below. And an honorary mention to the article on ‘this week’ vs ‘that week’, which just missed the Top 10 but is has by far produced the fiercest debating in the comments!

So, from the 10 years of the website, going by the WordPress stats, here’s a countdown of the Top 10 most viewed articles (click the titles to see the articles themselves):

10. 8 Grammar Rules for Writing Headlines

This was a hugely popular article for a while, from the very early days, but it’s not getting so much notice now: one that looks at some really tricky quirks of grammar!

9. Time Clauses

Likewise this proved popular for a long time, adapted first from a chapter of The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide. It was removed and later replaced in the book itself, but has been here on the site since the book came out!

8. “There Is A Lot” vs “There Are A Lot”

A very specific comparison that leans into more complicated ideas of plurals and the way we speak!

7. Do we say “on foot” or “by foot”?

Another comparison, much less controversial than the above, but something a lot of people wonder about…

6. How to Use Suffixes to Create Nouns

A more technical article, this one gets into vocabulary-building through grammar, which clearly people liked.

5. “At the end” vs “In the End”

The most popular of our comparisons articles, this one works not just to answer specific phrasing, but to discuss preposition use in general.

4. The English Tenses Timeline

The (in)famous timeline as mentioned above, part of what sparked everything! It seems dated now, but continues to draw in visitors. I’ve been quoted on this image for various websites and even in academic papers, and all, I should note, with a minor error (the image should say “I have gone to school”!).

3. Saying Large Numbers in English

Another from the very early days, this has long been one of the most popular articles on the site, which is curious considering it’s also one of very few pieces where I’ve discussed speaking skills or pronunciation. It’s generated lots of discussion over the years!

2. How to Write Dates in English and American

Coming in second place, with almost twice as many views as third place, is another numerical-themed article, surveying and comparing date conventions.

1. Future Tenses Exercise

And at number one, with a whooping 650,000 views, for reasons that I have no idea, my most popular article on this website is a really rather simple and innocuous future tenses exercise! It has been with us for almost the whole 10 years of the website, and still people are checking it out.

So, those are the ones the numbers lay out, but there’s plenty more to explore. There’s all sorts themed for Halloween and Christmas, reading and writing exercises and plenty more. You can delve deeper into them all here. Do you have a favourite article? Let me know.

All that remains is to thank you again for joining me, and here’s hoping for another 10 strong years. If you’d like to help me keep the site going, continue sharing it to your friends and fellow students or teachers, and consider supporting the site through buying or promoting the books, or even considering our Patreon subscription.

And don’t forget the store promo while it lasts! 

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