A personal letter. Thanks to Shirley on Flickr.

We launched Bitesize Irish Gaelic in August 2010 after toying with the idea in 2008. It’s a site with online Irish Gaelic language lessons, in bitesize chunks.

The idea of “release early, release often” had intrigued me when planning the site. Reading the free Getting Real ebook by 37Signals, the idea was quite straightforward: release a web app as early as possible and get feedback on it. Users will let you know what they think, and you can iteratively improve the app.

We launched Bitesize Irish Gaelic, and guess what, nobody told us what they thought.

The feedback form wasn’t once filled in by either prospects or members, while it was a part of the main navigation.

Meanwhile in mailing list land…

After launching, I came across Rob Walling who wrote Start Small, Stay Small. In the book, he has distilled his knowledge of starting web apps. He’s an advocate both of outsourcing tasks, and of keeping in contact with prospects through a mailing list, two things I haven’t dabbled in much.

Despite all my on-page optimisation since 2002, I had to a certain extent relied on drive-by online sign ups. In other words, I assumed that people complete whatever action (buying a product, becoming a member) on their first visit.

But more often than not, visitors aren’t immediately convinced and they may take a quick mental note to come back. Then, after building familiarity with you and your web app, they are far more likely to sign up.

So, I created two mailing lists: one for prospects and one for members. With Mailchimp, I set up autoresponders. An autoresponder to a mailing list is an email that you pre-write, and the recipient will get it so many days after signing up. I’ll concentrate on the members mailing list here:

• 2 days after signup, you get an autoresponder with “Get to know Bitesize”.
• 6 days after signup, you get “Track your learning progress”.
• 11 days after signup, you get an article on optimizing your learning.

Each autoresponder comes from me, Eoin Bitesize <eoin@bitesizeirishgaelic.com>, and at the end of each autoresponder email I say:

“I’d love to hear how you’re getting on with Bitesize Irish Gaelic. Just reply to this email to let me know”.

People are replying with feedback to these emails

Suddenly, I got people replying to the autoresponders. The members are telling me how they’re getting on, and it’s mostly positive. They tell me their story and how they started the service.

It’s exactly how I needed to get to know them; it’s exactly what a feedback form wasn’t doing.

Why email is probably easier

Familiarity with how email works: Whether it be Gmail, Facebook Mail (ok, I’m jumping ahead on that right now!), or Outlook, people generally know exactly how to reply to an email. They’re already familiar with the interface. They know where the reply button is, and they know generally how email works. When they get your personalised autoresponder, all they have to do is click reply to send you feedback.

Still, there are a couple of drawbacks to soliciting replies from a mailing list:

1. Many mailing list emails come from a “no-reply” email address, so many people don’t expect to be able to reply to an email that looks like it’s automated.
2. There is the question of whether their reply will ever get back to you or will ever be read.

More unknowns with online contact forms: On the other hand, getting people to contact you through a web page is more difficult, I would argue, for several reasons:

1. Visitors can’t tell where the contact form submits to. Will anybody ever read it?
2. Each contact page on the web looks different, leading to lack of familiarity with the steps required.
3. All sites have slightly different ways of linking to the content page.
4. They generally need to type in their name and email before typing any actual feedback.
5. It may take several clicks to submit a contact form if the form is linked to from another page.
6. There may be a CAPTCHA field needed to block spammers.

Unknowns for visitors when presented with an email address on a web page soliciting feedback:

1. If they are using a webmail address, their computer is probably not set up to deal correctly with clicking on an email address.
2. (Power users) If they send from several different email addresses such as for work or personal, which email address will be selected when clicking on the email link?
3. The email address may have some form of “NO-SPAM” embedded into it, requiring the sender to remove those characters, in an effort to avoid spam.
4. The email address may not even be linked to, but rather embedded in an image trying to avoid spammers.

How to use a mailing list to get feedback

1. As Rob Walling advocates, send your mailing list messages from your personal email address. Use your own name in the sender name field. I use Eoin Bitesize <eoin@bitesizeirishgaelic.com>.
2. Use minimal styling for your mailing list messages. Emails full of images mean advertising email spam. Non-styled emails more often come from humans.
3. Ask for feedback! Tell them specifically that they can simply reply to the email to contact you.
4. Sign off with your real name, and give your personal contact details such as your personal email address.

Bit of background

My web site as of around 1999.

During Christmas 1995, I decided to code myself a “personal webpage”. It was a one-page site. Of course, it had “under construction” dividers.

On it, I wrote about myself (as I am doing now). Very selfish. Anyway, part of that was to write some Irish, as it seemed somehow fun to write about myself in two languages.

The time between 1995 and 2002 is a bit of a blur. I remember that I did have a site “Eoin’s Fab Site”, which slowly formed to have a section called “All Things Irish”. That Irish section had a forum in it, probably by the late 1990s.

The problem was, I was just a kid in school. I didn’t have any money, so was doing everything to find free hosting. As each free host disappeared, I would install a new forum all over again.

In 2002, I finally bought a domain name, irishgaelictranslator.com. I made an announcement, and of course told everyone to register again. IrishGaelicTranslator.com Forum (known as IGTF to its regular members) finally had a permanent home to settle down in. (I should have chosen vBulletin in favour of phpBB, but oh well).

8 years on, and the forum has 60,000+ members who have posted, and 700,000+ posts. Today, for example, there have been 30 active threads. It’s not huge, but is nicely active considering its specific niche. Alont the way there were complaints of the original members as the forum grew bigger, as of course, there was less of a community feeling. Nevertheless, it’s still an active community with a very specific focus.

The single-forum forum

IrishGaelicTranslator.com Forum as of 2010.

IrishGaelicTranslator.com Forum was never divided into several forums. It was never referred to as “forums”. There was never doubt of where to post your message. You just posted your question into the forum. A bit of phpBB customisation made sure that you didn’t see a ‘forums index’.

Forums are still obviously very popular across the web. As far as I can tell, they are still the de facto way of setting up an active community. The problem is, most forum software are hard-coded to have multiple forums. The more sub-fora the merrier! Surely not, for any modestly-sized community that has a specific focus.

There are definitely a couple of problems directly related to sub-dividing your community entrance into different forums:

• You don’t know what to post where. The person setting up the web site either created lots of specific forums trying to pre-empt your question, or they’ve divided in to, say, three generic forums that are so general you still don’t know where to post.
• Forums get stagnant. Take Irish Webmasters Forum as an example. It’s a great place to meet fellow Irish webmasters. The downside: it has links to 35 different forums on their forum index. Where the hell should I post my question? When I was browsing a specific sub-forum a few months ago, the last thread was a month old. Despite the site having the perfect audience, asking my question in the forum would probably only been seen by a handful of people.
• Ultimately, it divides your community.  By taking the single-page approach, everyone focuses on one single forum page, everyone sees each request, and everyone knows where to post.

Unless your forum is hugely popular, I think you’re doing people a favour by keeping everything on one page. People skim content and choose what to read and ignore. I do the same with news site: skim the headlines and read what I want. I don’t click into each of their news sections just to see what’s going on in the world.

Reddit is a good example of this. They have a single page of news items. To deal with the many many links that are submitted, you can still choose to drill down into sub-reddits. But for a smaller site, even that step wouldn’t be needed.

I’ve had the single-page forum for 8 years now, and wouldn’t have it any other way. There are other multi-forum sites I have set up since (especially Irishionary.com forums), but that was due to lack of time to customise the software. The trick is that you need time to set up a custom single-page forum.

If you run a community forum, or are a member of one, let me know what you think about the merits of this approach.