giveaway winner and feedback from you

Posted on 29. Apr, 2010 by Princess Lasertron in business, FAQ

Congratulations to Chelsea, or “random number 223,” who won the giveaway for a package of fun crafty goodies. There’s a headband in there, some vintage supplies, a handmade pencil case, and some other cute stuff thrown in as well.

I had a huge amount of feedback from my annual reader survey and I am so grateful to everyone who took the time to give me their opinions about their reader/user experience here. You can still respond to my survey here if you want to share your thoughts with me–I’m appreciative of all responses.

A few of my assumptions were shown to be wrong and I learned a lot about what you like and dislike as blog readers. The biggest surprises:

…You generally aren’t bored by baby posts. I always assumed that other people didn’t really care about my kid/those aspects of my personal life. Holy moly was I ever wrong.
…Most of you have been reading for at least a year, and many for over two years. I didn’t realize I had such a loyal base!
…Several of you–like dozens and dozens–asked me about teaching craft workshops or speaking about small business ownership which is a huge compliment. After the opening of CAMP this summer, my schedule will be more open for those kinds of engagements and events.
…YOU ALL LOVE MY CAT. Hilarious.

Things you want more of that I will do my best to improve:

…Posts about my home and how we’ve decorated–umm, with tons of dirty laundry, at the moment. Alice’s nursery is looking really adorable though and we also just bought some new chairs and redecorated our front room with an interior designer, so those photos will be exciting to share.
…More DIY and video tutorials–sometimes they take so long to put together that I put it off. But I do have some good ideas for easy future projects that I haven’t seen on other blogs before and I’m excited to share those soon.
…More guest posts from Mr. Lasertron. A lot of you want to hear him talk about vegan life and read posts from him about food. As the house chef I think one of those once in a while would be right up his alley.
…You want me to fill up my Etsy shop again. I need 100 hours a day for that! I really hate using Etsy because the amount of time it takes to upload and ship products is more than I can afford to spend. The user interface is extremely bulky and I also disagree with many of their policies. I need to find an easier way to maintain an online store though so I can upload more inventory. Aaaaaand this is a job for my intern. (Who you will soon meet! I found him! Yes, him!)

Rather than use Etsy, I make more money and save more time communicating directly with customers through e-mail for custom orders. If you are waiting for the shop to fill up, it will again eventually, but you are always welcome to contact me through e-mail too.

Finally, many of you still have trouble with the new website redesign because you are used to reading blogs where you can scroll down endlessly and read full posts (as in Typepad or Blogger). You don’t like the grid of posts and having to click “read more” to get to them. That was a style decision I made to fit more content on the main page and make it easy for you to skim the post titles and decide what is most relevant to you.

Thanks again everyone and congrats to Chelsea. I’ll put that box in the mail for you asap!

xo
meg