Week 1

So, we found hay. Malcolm is not needed. In fact we came up with an inspired solution – instead of getting the farm to come to us, we should go to the farm. It’s that kind of deep strategic thinking that drives this business machine forward folks. Woohoo, watch out ebay.

When not searching for hay we’ve been responding to the feedback you’ve been sending over in our rather jam-packed first week. We’ve had 100s of emails. Ordinarily this blight on my attention span would be cause to power down and crack open the sherry. However, when the emails are really valuable feedback it’s an excuse to er, crack open the sherry. An anonymised example of what we’ve had:

bq. I just registered with folksy and I did not receive the confirmation mail. I tried to re-register but it seems it didn’t work as I cannot use my username “blah blah blah” anymore.

I did the blah blah bit. This example was highly typical. We ‘enjoyed’ some tricky times with email. And the fun goes on as a few people still don’t seem to receive their registration / activation emails. ISPs and email clients don’t offer any clues. More head scratching on that one.

Another example, again, not untypical, was the irksome nature of the ‘profile pages’ and the [in]ability to jump between shop pages and user profile pages. We admit, this sucks. And we’re onto it. I’d share some of the new wireframes with you but tbh they’re just boxes and arrows and not the sort of thing designed to keep eyeballs on blog posts.

Some stats from the first week:

bq. 25000 page views, over 500 users [mostly from the UK] and 44% of user using Firefox and 1 [yes, 1] user from Central America. God Bless those Central Americans.

Don’t you just love Google Analytics? It makes trivia profoundly interesting and relevant. Doesn’t it…. doesn’t it… And all this was driven by a few rulers, a mention to a few northern crafty people [cough, Sally], a post in the UK Handmade Flickr group and the word-of-mouth of the brilliant early testers. And these people, you probably, have also created our first Flickr group, created badges for your blogs [thanks Melissa will put up on blog soon] and a blog ring [which I need to work out, thanks Vicki!]. CJ also created a Folksy Facebook group [well, we felt like we were missing out]. And, as Sally mentions, we even sold some stuff. Eight things. Small, baby steps but we’ll get there :)

So, huge thanks for the first week. We’ll be beavering away to fix some of the remaining things you’ve flagged up and then working on getting the ‘making’ section live so you can showcase how talented you are [is that sycophantic enough?].