State of the Blog: February Update

Happy Valentine’s Day, Ladies!  Sadly, being single on this day of love has left me feeling morose and depressed beyond all measure.  I was so overcome by my grief that I spent my weekend neck deep in a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and didn’t finish any posts for today.  Just kidding. 

Like most single women, I intend to spend Valentine’s Day like I do every other day, working for the betterment of the American people.  However, I fully intend to celebrate Half-Price Chocolate Day tomorrow with several boxes of discounted Godiva products.  Hallelujah!  But enough about the holiday o’love, let’s talk about the blog.

Today, there will be no posts.  I let a web designer go picking around inside the framework of the site this weekend and things got messy.  Like when you decide to let your boyfriend/husband do the cooking and the kitchen winds up looking like a tornado hit it messy.  So today’s posts are being retrieved from the ether and will be posted at a later date.  But now that I have this open space, I thought it might be a good opportunity to update you on the State of the Blog.

Design.  I’ve spent the better part of six months trying to get this site redesigned to my exact specifications, and things have not worked out as planned.  But, I recently discovered that a distant relative is in the web design business, and if you can’t trust your second cousin twice removed, who can you trust? 

I have full confidence that he will be able to help me redo this site for a price that doesn’t make my wallet scream uncle like a bullied kid on a playground.  Though I have no idea how long this will take.

Frequency.  As some of you know, before the holidays, I mentioned that I was going to cut back on the number of posts.  Ultimately, I realized that posting less than 15 times per week would be dangerous for my addiction to site traffic and decided against it.  So there will no reduction in the number of posts, but there will be two changes that some of you have probably already noticed.

First, twice a week, the 10^th Commandment post will feature a single under-$150 item, instead of the traditional three items. Why? 

You would be shocked at how long it takes to put the morning posts together, and this saves me a lot of time and energy.  To make up for this change, I incorporated the Three Ways posts of Tuesday afternoon, which will always feature whatever item I’m peddling in the morning post.

The second change is the addition of discussion posts.  Credit where it’s do, the idea for this change came from my Style Coalition colleague and all-around awesome chick, Corporette, and I chose to incorporate these posts for a couple of reasons. 

One, we’ve developed such a vibrant community on CHS, that I wanted to foster discussions and debates between my readers.  I always enjoy reading the comments you leave, and I thought this might be a good way to elicit more of them. 

And two, I receive a lot of e-mails from young (college age and slightly older) women looking for advice about working on the Hill, and I thought that the Wednesday post (The Hill Life) would be a good way to respond to some of those queries.  Think of it as mentoring a new generation of young professionals.

These changes have really taken the edge off of my work load, and I think they’ve contributed something valuable to the site.  But that being said, this blog is still predominantly a fashion blog, at least 13 times per week.

Fashion Week.  This season, I swore that I was going to go to New York Fashion Week.  I sent in an application, paid the fee, and waited, and waited, and waited…only to be approved one week before the shows started.  Blast! 

Unfortunately, this left me with few options for taking off of work, finding a hotel that I could afford or wrangling invites to the weekend shows.  (All but one of the shows I was invited to was on a weekday.)  But, never fear, all of the NYFW photos are available on Style.com, so I will be posting my thoughts on the upcoming trends as the week goes on.  Hopefully, I will be able to fulfill my lifelong fashion week dreams in September.

Men’s Style.  No one was more surprised than I to learn that I have male readers.  So when their numbers grew to the point where I was receiving e-mails and Tweets from men, I decided to incorporate a men’s post, The Sharper Staffer, into the lineup.  However, as the weeks go on, I’ve realized that I loathe writing these posts.  So I’m going to try to think up a new way to handle them.  Maybe I end up posting these on Saturday or maybe I bring in a man (like we did with “Beau”) to guest blog and then I can just add my thoughts to his post.

I certainly don’t want to ignore the men who read this blog, but there are days when I would rather do multiplication tables than write the men’s style posts.  And I hate math like Tea Partiers hate taxes.

New Column.  For a few months, I have been thinking about writing an interview column asking stylish women to share their best advice.  A lot of magazines do this, but they always seem to be interviewing actresses, millionaires, and assorted famous women who, while stylish, have sartorial advantages (stylists, closets full of designer duds, etc.) that the rest of us don’t enjoy. 

The first column will appear this Thursday, and I’m really excited about it.  I’ve lined up a few participants already, but if you have someone that you would like to recommend, feel free to email capitolhillstyle (at) gmail (dot) com.  I would prefer local women, but it’s not critical that they be from this area.

Thanks everyone for reading.  I couldn’t be more grateful to all of you for stopping by every day, and all the opportunities that your continued support has afforded me and for your kind words of support and thanks.  If you have any suggestions for content or opinions about what you read, feel free to leave them in the comments.  I’d love to hear your thoughts.