Important Changes at Nappycino

[Jo]

Over the last week or so there has been a lot of behind the scenes discussion with our Mods, Admin & WAHM's regarding the future and direction of Nappycino. I have taken some time offline to do some thinking and soul searching and come up with some answers and solultions to our direction and growth.

As everyone would be aware, our Nappycino Header states "Proudly Supporting Australian WAHM's". When Ecobubba was established and then taken over by myself as Nappycino, we were predominantly a WAHM based forum, supporting each other in our businesses. As of today, we have 566 members, only a handful of whom are WAHP's. During the week beginning the 14th of May, Nappycino.com had 15,007 visitors, from varying parts of the world. It is becoming clear that our user base and readers are NOT predominantly WAHP's anymore.

Nappycino is clearly now a site which supports the Australian Cloth Community, including Cloth Users, WAHP's & Prospective Cloth Users. To that end, we need to switch our focus towards these users, rather than towards our WAHP's. In theory, this sounds simple, but it has required a great deal of thought and discussion

Over the coming weeks there will be some changes in Nappycino as we shift towards an end user focussed community. These changes will see our guidelines rewritten, specifically those regarding the mentioning of brand and product names. Once guidelines have been written, the discussion of CLOTH nappy brands will be permitted for the purpose of product support. As Kristy pointed out several weeks ago in a discussion she started in Idle Talk, the current guidelines are OTT and confusing. I agree wholeheartedly with this and it has been on my mind since this discussion was raised, I will therefore be aiming to make these guidelines more relaxed, balanced and clear (thanks Kristy btw for that discussion, it was a good indication of what needs to be looked at...).

There will be more changes over the coming weeks. The costs associated with running Nappycino are currently distributed across three sources; Donations, My wallet, WAHP Advertising. We have received close to $200 in generous donations from our users, which has helped to move us to a new server and prepay our hosting costs, restore our forum database after a serious data corruption and renew our vBulletin software licensing. The WAHP advertising, for the most part, is covering our domain names and hosting.

Although the donations and advertising fees have now released the stranglehold on my bank account with much appreciation and relief, it's enough to cover our costs but not enough for us to grow. To that end, we will be introducing some user pays charges on areas of the forum, to assist in funding the future development of Nappycino. We will also be running some competitions over the coming weeks.

What do we need the money for? Well, we will have two seperate goals in the short term. The first is for software to automate our business listings. The structure of our Business Listings will change at this time, allowing free text only listings for related businesses, along with standard and premium listings with galleries, etc. Businesses from these listings can be reviewed through the software, so we can have a comprehensive list of cloth orientated businesses with reviews to make it easier to find exactly what you're looking for. The cost of this software is $99USD.

The second purchase we will be aiming for is a biggun Auction software. We have implemented and tested every free and cheap readily available auction script on the market and none of them have offered the stability or functionality we would require to integrate them into the site. An auction site will allow users to sell second hand and new items at auction without the hardcore ebay fees. It will also allow up and coming WAHM's to offer their products in auction and buy it now style listings. The cost of this software varies depending on the features, and we will go with whatever we can afford The average price for full featured auction software is around $300USD.

So...will auctions be free? No, they won't. There will be a small charge on some auctions, but it will be a lot less than those charged by ebay. The auction fees will then fund other Nappycino ventures which include "Welcome to the world gifts" to welcome new cloth bubbas. Swap kits for each state to pet and share. Nappycino promo and advocacy items.

We will be commencing fund raising for these projects over the coming weeks. Throughout the weeks of fundraising, I will be updating totals regularly as we make our way towards our financial goals.

[~Melissa~]

Wow Jo. Sounds exciting (and like lots of hard work for you and the NC team!).

15,000 users in one week!! OMG!! Isn't that great exposure?!

[Katanya]

Great direction Jo...looking forward to seeing the changes!

[johT]

i agree - some very exciting things coming up -yay!

[kriscee]

love the auction idea! very exciting.

[betty]

sounds fantastic!
the auction idea is great, especially as ebay is huge and one can't be sure of the quality of goods they are buying, I would much rather buy and sell stuff here.

I have been looking at selling the odd piece of hand made clothes on ebay to see if their is interest in what I can make, but I haven't been inspired from the whole ebay experince. I can hold off for a bit and make a few more until this auction is set up

Is the layout of the forum going to change? I think it is user friendly as is and really eay to read. Another forum I visit changed their format a while ago and I think it made it a lot harder to read and get involved in.

[Lousmum]

sounds excellent! hopefully Nappycino will become an even better place for clothies in the future than it already is now!

[Nicky]

Very exciting!
The auction software sounds great

[Kris]

Sounds good Jo, can't wait to see the changes

[adalheid]

oooo things sound very exciting
Its good to see the cloth message is really getting out there seeing the fourm had 15,007 users in one week that is really something