Survey 2012 – answers and giveaway winner

Now this seems kind of fitting – post no. 1.400 is all about answering your questions, talking about your suggestions and giving away prize to one of our readers.

Let’s get started … there is a lot issues to go over.

1. Design, colors …

Some of you love the colors, others don’t like them, some of you find our site charming other see it like “kids highschool project”. :D I hope you see where I’m going with this – it’s basically impossible to satisfy everybody. We all have our color preferences so at any given time, there is bound to be at least third of you who will dislike it. Those of our readers that have been with us from the start know that every once in a while we change the look of our blog. Blog design usually reflects our mood with spice of current season. We don’t really have time to play around with graphics, but I can tell you that I seriously doubt that our blog will ever look “professional”. We “talk” to you the same way we would have to our friends, not as impartial observer writing for magazine … that is why blog has more “at home” look.

We will be making text darker and background lighter as some of you reported that you’re having difficulties reading the text.

2. Navigation

Yeah – we missed Previous/Next post buttons too. When we updated the theme, they went missing. We searched for the “bug” for a while, but then gave up. When number of you commented on the fact, we put it high up on our to do list. We spent hours searching for the problem, only to find out that they obviously removed that option … so we manually added the code.
Majority of you find Parokeets blog to be easy to navigate through.
We would love to put 10 previews on the front page, but it would considerably slow the loading time, so we opted not to.

3. Watermark

This one come up couple of times. I already talked about the issue so I’ll just reply to few direct suggestions:
– if we put WM in the corner of the photo it would be simple to crop it out … seen it happen a dozen of times.
– frame is there because 90% of users never cites where is the photo from … sad, but true;
– inner watermark makes our photos undesirable for companies to “borrow” them and at the same time tells you which of the Parokeets ladies is the author. I try to make my signature as sheer as possible … except on the swatches of products that are usually the target of “borrowing”.

4. Mobiles

I must admit I don’t have problem reading our blog on my mobile. We looked into the possibility of some kind of smart-phone theme last year, but none really appealed to us. But things change quickly in this field, so somebody could be making the perfect thing right now.

5. Giveaways

I agree with you – more smaller giveaways would be great. But there are two problems – time and shipping costs. We’re trying to solve time issue with new giveaway form and shipping costs with ads.

6. Skincare

I see this is something that interests you so hopefully you’ll soon get to read more about the subject. I see that many of you have sensitive skin and as I can really relate to that, expect to read more about oily and sensitive skin issues. Hopefully other Parokeets ladies will have time to write something about products for dry skin.

7. Foundations

Lots of brand request, skin types … all of those will be addressed in our Project foundation series … staring soon.

Individual answers:
– Alessandro nail polishes should have sticker on the cap with the name and number … if there is one – sometimes they’re without (especially the older ones);
– feel free to answer our forms in Slovenian and Croatian or Serbian language;
– have no idea what is meant by “make better interaction with the readers”. Further explanation would be very welcomed;
– tab with popular posts is on our WL, but we can’t use automatic one as lots of old giveaway posts would show up and we have no time to add another manual task to our already loooong list;
– same thing with photo gallery – would love to have it sorted by color but shudder at the amount of work it would take;
– video gallery is as it is because it’s handled by plugin … if we wanted to make any kind of sorting … more work;
– archives with individual posts? I’m afraid that is not possible with 1.400 of them. It would be more prudent to search by the categories in the menu;
– if you’re logged out ~once a month, then that is OK as it’s safety feature, if you’re logged out all the time, then something is not working as it should – it could be cookie/browser conflict or maybe something else. I don’t have enough info to solve this problem;
– if you get notice that you’re previously logged in with that email, you can contact me (from the specified email) at blog(at)parokeets.com and I’ll delete the email from database, so you’ll be able to use it for direct login;
– you can find me on Pintrest, but I doubt blog will get its profile there.

I too miss Mamy’s flowers, Goga’s lipsticks and Maestra’s makeup and nail combos. To bad that days are not longer, so all of us would have more time for the blog.

Google Docs are becoming more and more unreliable, so we’ll probably stop using them altogether. 40 of you answered in Google form while it was still available and 22 in WordPress plugin. Random.org chose no 45 as our winner.

So this cute prize …

… goes to …

iadoreparokeetspageandicanfindalotofusefulltipsandtrickstomakemy
beautycornerbetterthankyyougirlsforyoureffordandtimehugsandkisses

Congratulation! Please send us email with password and your address to blog(at)parokeets.com.

Same goes for few other readers who wrote very useful and extremely detailed answers and will be also getting little something in the mail:
– Itsthesmallthingsthatmakeushappy
– wannabeatranslator123
– MasterOfPuppets

Thank you so much for your answers – they really mean the world to us.