What’s happening at Folksy: September 2010

A selection of items from the most viewed shops of August 2010. Congratulations to Diomo Glass, Nikki Made, Babylonglegs, Whimsical Wren Jewellery and Jude Allman

There’s always a lot going on at Folksy and we would like to get into the habit of updating our buyers, sellers and visitors more regularly, in a spot where you can easily find us. We’ve thought about different ways to do this and decided we’d try a monthly blog post which looks back at the previous month and forward to the next. So here is issue 1.

August 2010

• Folksy had visits from 179,241 different people – a 12% increase on July and 160% on August 2009 (and that’s not including figures from the forums or the blog)
• August 2010 was our busiest month ever for new members – over 3,000 people joined us
• There were over 4300 orders, up 550% on this time last year.
• The Folksy Facebook page has been a huge success, we have over 2000 fans already (thank you!).  We recently launched the ‘Shop of the Day’ feature which has been extremely popular. If you sell with us it could be you…
• Top referers to the site in August were Facebook, Google, Twitter, Ravelry and Stumble Upon.

Technical Developments

Doug Livesy, our new developer started in July. Doug has hardly had time to find his feet before getting stuck into improving Folksy’s performance and stability which has suffered as the site gets busier. The work involves rewriting and testing out lots of code – painstaking work. Progress wasn’t helped by a fearsome Russian spam attack to the forums (ouch!) but Doug and Rob have worked hard to repel this attack and stop it happening again.The slow site speed issues that were evident at peak times have now been tackled and there is ongoing work to keep the site speedy. We really appreciate your patience while the work was ongoing.

Facebook Store Coming Soon

Yes, it’s a Folksy shop on Facebook! This exciting new feature, allowing you to show your store on your own Facebook page, is scheduled to go live in October / November  .  We’re hoping this will generate lots of extra traffic to your shops and we’ll be posting plenty of advice on how to make the most of this great new feature.

If you don’t yet have a Facebook account, we have a recent post with details on how to set up a facebook fan page. The application itself will only take a few minutes to set up.

What else?

There’s a number of other features that the team has been concentrating on this month in order to ensure the site is optimised for the Christmas rush. Top of the “new features” list are making registration easier (removing the email confirmation step) and allowing sellers to create Shop Sections.

Christmas seems to start ever sooner and planning for Christmas needs to start now. We’re seeing more and more Christmas items being listed and are stepping up our PR activity with plans for another Festive Sampler already underway. We’ll be looking out for beautiful items to feature, so do get listing!

Halloween Tags

Before Christmas consumes us completely, we’ll be promoting Halloween items. Tag relevant items with “Halloween” to ensure they appear in the Halloween promo.

A selection of items available at www.folksy.com tagged with ‘Halloween’

The Blog

The blog is growing in readers daily now we have improved the content by providing clearer features on making and promoting your work. Our latest series is the fantastic guest post column on a Thursday that has seen Craftsville, OOH.com, Creative Boom and Oh Comely all feature this last month. Oh Comely (an exciting new glossy magazine for creative types) have also offered an exclusive crafty competition for Folksy members as part of their guest post.   Please contact hilary@folksy.co.uk to be added to the monthly contributers email or if you have an idea for a blog post.

How are we doing?

We’d like to know if this sort of update is useful, so do give us your feedback on how we could improve. See you next month!

:) The Folksy Team – Anne, Hilary, Toni, Doug, Andrew, Rob and James.