Our Little Rant by Eightball & Thundercloud
From InfoAve Premium Issue #95 - August 12, 2005
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A Thank You Card
Sometimes
we're guilty of thinking of all our subscribers as "friends". Well to us you are
friends but you don't really know us and we don't really know you. We're just the people
who write the newsletters you get each Friday and you're the nice people who read them
(even though at least two of you think I'm whacko, I still love ya anyway!).
As most of you know by now,
sometimes I'm guilty of circumlocution - well you know, being long-winded. I tend to
ramble like I'm doing right now. But that's just me. Anyway, Eightball told me to keep
this brief so I'm going to try. I promise. Really I do. Despite my tendency to be garrulous,
today I'm going to follow Eightball's advice and turn it down a notch.
We both wanted to thank you for your support of our new Start
page. Summertime is a very slow time for our Cloudeight Stationery site. Since we have
volumes of things for Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine's Day, autumn and winter are our
busy times. Sometimes in the spring and summer we
find the bills pile up faster than our income and we start scratching our heads for ideas
how to make it through the summer financially.
We discussed several ideas
- including putting pop-ups and pop-unders on the site again, which we really didn't want
to do. Number one: We hate them. Number two: You hate them. And we hate to continually ask
for donations, although they're always welcome and appreciated. We can only advertise our
own products a zillion times before everyone is so used to seeing them they become
invisible. So, the "Start Page" idea was born.
Google pays us a few cents for
searches conducted from the search box on our Start page. It's not much, but it adds up
when enough people use it to perform searches. However, we realized that just sticking a
search box on a page was not going to be valuable to you. So we talked about what things
we liked and used and we came up with news headlines, dictionary, and weather. We put
together a start page we thought would be interesting to enough of you and told all of you
about it. And, some of you answered by making it your start page and it has really helped
us. We appreciate those of you who've already make our start page your start page more
than you know.
We've tried to add features to
the page without adding bloat to it. Many of these features were based on your
suggestions. Still, there are other suggestions we just cannot do because of various
issues such as database storage, scripts and other things we don't want to get into for
various reasons. We have talked about making the page customizable so each of you would
have a start page featuring the items you want most. But, this requires we store data
about you in a database and we didn't want to do that. And, after all, there are many
other sites that let you do this and we didn't want to get into that fray. We just a small
business and we have no desire to go head-to-head with Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves,
Google and the others. I mean if you're an ant you don't intentionally try to get stepped
on, do you?
But we have tried to make it as
nice as we can for you. There's not a whole lot of decoration or other things that would
make the page load more slowly - especially for those of you still using dial-up Internet.
We have put a lot more tips, tricks, and Cloudeight site news on the page too, and try to
keep it updated several times a week. The news of course is updated as it happens and the
new Photo News is very nice too.
Well, I suppose by now, all of
you and Eightball too are shaking your heads because I'm back to my usual chatty self,
huh? OK. I'm sorry. I can't help it. It must be something in my genes.
We really do appreciate those of
you who have helped us a great deal by making our new start page your start page. We want
to thank you. And we want to thank those of you who buy our products and make donations
too. Without you we couldn't continue nor would we have any reason to continue.
It's hard to convey emotion in
this format, but we are truly touched by your support. We try hard to earn your respect by
telling you the truth about things on the Internet as we see it. Sometimes you might think
we've gone a little overboard. We care a great deal about what you think of us and we will
never intentionally do anything to diminish the trust you place in us.
Thank you so very much for all
you do for us. We appreciate it more than you know and more than all the words I could
ever write could say.
Tell us what you think -
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new Start page!
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