Every now and then we like to give you all an update of what is going on behind the scenes here at 11 Magnolia Lane. To start with, if you’ve been visiting us for any period of time you’ve probably noticed some changes in how the site looks over the last few weeks. These things are truly slippery slopes…we started because we really wanted to rework our newsletter and somehow that turned into a total site design overhaul!
While we try to be consistent with our branding, Christy and I have been talking about simplifying the site for a long time, so we have reworked our logo and simplified our category buttons on our sidebar. We’ve crossed into the FIFTH year of our blog and have over one thousand posts in our archives so we have to be mindful of ways to keep our best content available to you all, our readers.
Hopefully you all like the change, but we’d love to hear what you think! We know that some of you would like us to eliminate all our ads, please trust that we are working behind the scenes to speed up our site {those thousand photo-heavy posts take up a lot of server space!} and that is not just time consuming but costly, so the ads are necessary to offset these administrative costs. We’re making the investment because we want you to enjoy any time you spend here and not be sitting around waiting for our pages to load!
{If you are interested you can read this POST about the business aspects of running a blog}
For all of you who are newsletter subscribers {and if you aren’t signed up already, just click here to receive either our daily or weekly recap}, with the help of the fabulous Kirsten of Sweet Tea and Saving Grace we are super-excited that we’ve overhauled the 11 Magnolia Lane newsletter. We love the new look and in this case, we did eliminate the newsletter ads so as not to take away from our daily content. Don’t forget if you sign up for our newsletter you receive our best “organizing ideas” e-book for free!
There’s more! Later this week we’ll be launching our new and revitalized Pretty Project Party! We’ve renamed the Pretty Preppy Party to be more all-encompassing–we want to see ALL your blog projects so be ready to link them up this coming Thursday. We also are thrilled to announce that two new hostesses will be joining us each month, we’re pleased to welcome Rachael from This is Our Bliss and Tammy from Pink Peppermint Design to the party. We love giving you all the opportunity to show us your projects, so we’re excited to showcase what you all have been up to.
Finally, over the last year we’ve had the privilege of growing the business aspects of our site {again, much behind the scenes} by working with the Elite Blog Academy. We wanted to pass on that if you are a blogger, just starting a blog or even thinking about starting a blog in the future, the Elite Blog Academy is offering a FREE three -part training starting this week. While the EBA has been well worth the financial investment we made to participate in it, the opportunity to take advantage of FREE training from some of the industry “gurus” is too good not to pass along to those of you who might be interested. This three- part video training kicks off on February 16th, you can sign up or get more information by clicking the image below.
While 11 Magnolia Lane is a joint ‘labor of love’ for both Christy and I, we appreciate every minute of being able to grow this site from a small hobby to a business/creative outlet, but most importantly we are grateful you all continue to come back to see what we’ve been up to!
In non-blog related news, Christy was hard at work this last weekend pulling off a fabulous fundraiser, she’ll be back tomorrow to share all about that so be sure to stop by and see it all then.
Enjoy your day!
XO,
