Blog changes… What are your thoughts?

I have some changes planned for the blog in the next few months, and I’d love to hear what you think. Please let me know if you have thoughts or ideas on any of this!

I learned so much from our recent survey. I want to thank everyone who took the time to answer it… we had about 600 responses and I read every word. Now I’d like to tell you what I learned, and see if you have anything you’d like to add.

I won’t include everything, because there is a ton of good information. And we are going to tweak things that aren’t mentioned here. But I think this should cover the biggest points.

Interaction:

• More Posts: Many of you said you’d like more of the same, which is nice to hear! Some people said they’d like to have daily posts. I think we come pretty close to that already, so starting in August we’ll nudge it up a little and start posting every weekday.
• Improve the comments: A few of you said that you felt there were a couple commenters who seem antagonistic or who are always correcting others. I want this to be a supportive place for everyone, and I consider it my responsibility to make sure you all feel welcome. I’m happy to say that I think I’ve hit upon a good technical solution for this, so let’s see how it goes.

Visuals:

• Design and aesthetic is important: Many of you commented that you like the design or aesthetic of the blog, though a few of you suggested improvements to the layout. We’re actually working on a full redesign right now, which should debut late next month. It will look pretty different around here, but equally charming and much less cluttered (I think)!
• Add Video: Several people suggested adding video to the tutorials. I agree that this would be great! I’m looking at some video options now.

Blog topics:

• More tutorials: You guys love tutorials! I think almost everyone said they want more. Now, I think we already feature a LOT of tutorials, and I definitely don’t plan to slow down on that. But we might include some different types and more pattern-specific ones, as well as general sewing techniques. And we’re thinking about labeling tutorials with a skill level to help you, as well as make sure we have a good balance of beginner / intermediate / advanced.
• More organization for the tutorials: I know it’s hard to find tutorials we’ve done before. We have some awesome features to fix that coming up in the web site redesign! We’ll keep them categorized and easy to find again later.
• More sewalongs and fitting advice: This was a big request. I haven’t done much of this here because there have been so many great sewalongs on other blogs, but now I see that it would make sense to have them here as well. So we’ll be starting a new sewalong very very soon! I’ll be sure to include specific fitting advice for some common alterations.
• More customer projects: This was another huge one! Understandably, you said you feel inspired seeing the patterns on real sewists with different body types and styles. So we plan to introduce a new feature on the blog to showcase some of our favorites.

  Oh, and several people mentioned that they miss the old “gallery” page we used to have. Well, honestly, it just got too big and difficult to manage or update. BUT, again, we’re going to add features in the new design that will bring some of that back to the site. So yay!

• Our finished projects: Many people said they’d like to see more of what we’re working on, both for personal sewing and for CP. So we’ll be sharing more of that too (though to be honest, I’ve mostly been sewing boring things like curtains for my new house!)
• More design process and sneak peeks: You guys seem pretty interested in hearing about how the patterns are designed and made, as well as getting sneak peeks of what’s coming. Since we have patterns for Fall coming, I’ll start sharing some of our design process for those in the coming weeks!

Other stuff:

• You like Snippets!: Even though we didn’t ask about it specifically, I was really happy to see that many people mentioned that you really like Snippets! That is awesome. A few people did say that they’d like the emails to be longer or more in depth. But I do think the short format of “quick tips” seems best suited to email, with the more in depth stuff here on the blog. Any thoughts?

These are just some of the ideas I came away with. I also have a huge list of topics and questions you suggested, which is so so awesome and useful.

So what do you guys think? Does this sound like a good direction for the blog?