We recently put out a short survey to get a temperature check on some future ideas and the stuff we’re already doing. We got a modest response — 180 respondents — and learned quite a lot from those.
Thanks so much to everyone who responded!
Let’s break down some key questions:
“If we explored short, focused, cheaper courses, would you be interested?”permalink
A very surprising 76% of respondents backed this idea. It’s surprising because we don’t tend to see many short courses around, aside from on platforms that charge a monthly fee.
We’re not interested in charging a monthly fee, but what we are interested in is publishing more courses. A full course takes an unbelievable amount of time and effort to produce and it’s a hell of a risk for both author and publisher.
Our thinking is by doing shorter courses, we can better expand the diversity of course authors on the platform and vastly increase the volume of our offering. Our pricing is very competitive already, but £249 is a lot of money. By offering shorter, more focused courses for a smaller price-point should open up high quality education for more people and that’s a good thing.
We’ll action this one for sure. In fact — even though I’m still tired from writing Complete CSS — I do have an idea for a rather interesting short course… More on that later.
We’re slowly opening up for pitches for course authors but if you are thinking that could be you, please get in touch because we’d love to have a chat.
“If Piccalilli explored more tasteful advertising options, that would be:”permalink
Let’s break these ones into a table because it’s quite spread.
| Response | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Do what you need to do | 47.22% |
| Fine if you keep it minimal | 44.44% |
| Annoying | 3.89% |
| Other | 2.22% |
| Blank (no answer) | 2.22% |
Related, here’s the answers to “In your opinion, advertising on Piccalilli is:”
| Response | Percentage |
|---|---|
| I don’t even notice it | 39.44% |
| OK | 31.11% |
| Subtle | 25.56% |
| Annoying | 2.22% |
| Blank (no answer) | 1.67% |
These answers surprised me especially, but I’m starting to suspect it might be because I’m British and a big advertising hater 😅. Ads do pay the bills for a lot of publishers though, so I also appreciate them for that.
I’ve had quite a few conversations with other people in publishing recently and almost all have commented that our ads are way too subtle so it’s interesting to see that from readers too.
There’s absolutely no way we’d ship ads that were annoying, nor would we ship ads that track our readers because we actually care, a lot. It’s warming to know that we’re probably in a good position to turn the dial up a bit though. If you’re an advertiser and have comments about our current offering, get in touch. We’d love to chat with you!
“Should Piccalilli explore merchandise?”permalink
For this question, 47% answered with yes, 37% answered with no and 16% left that question unanswered.
This feels about right. What we’re going to do is trial merch with a simple Teemill store. If the demand is there, we’ll explore investing more into the idea and produce a nice setup like Astro’s new Astro Mart.
“We’ve been considering working on a Piccalilli job board. Sound good?”permalink
A staggering 74% of respondents thought this was a good idea. We got a few comments that were slightly more negative though that I want to address:
What would make it different for the dozens, hundreds others that exist.
And…
How would it be different from the hundreds of others. Also, most job boards are either spam or scams.
I certainly don’t agree with the second one. I’m sure there are plenty of job boards out there that are bad, but not scams and certainly not most job boards. People looking for roles are in a vulnerable position which guarantees some of the worst people will exploit that. Not us though.
The big thing for us would be absolute transparency. No job would be listed without a salary range and an honest remote/in-house status. An idea kicking around is enabling people to filter by various properties and get an RSS feed of that filter too, so they can keep an eye on roles at their own pace.
We’re certainly going to explore this idea more though! As this respondent alludes to…
I’m not against it, but I’m unsure how successful they are in general. It might require a lot of maintenance and admin from yourselves, for little gain. That being said - all power to you to give it a go
There is a lot of maintenance, admin and verification, but we’ve certainly got the resources and willing to do that part right.
“What are your thoughts on our new open working projects effort?”permalink
A surprising 67% of respondents say they thought it was cool with 24% not getting it or not being interested. I’m personally quite surprised at that because I didn’t think it was landing well at all.
The big difference — as I see it — should be when we actually work on the projects we’re setting out to work on. We are making plenty of moves on that front. I’m working with a couple of progressive movements and will be meeting with our local member of parliament, during parliamentary recess, who is rather confident something very good can come from this for local services like food banks. That’ll be great.
We’re being extra careful in making sure the projects we do work on are going to tangibly make people’s lives better, especially those in the most need. That careful approach takes time. We’ll get there.
I like this idea too:
It’s cool. I think you could do more to promote it honestly. Create little project roadmap index pages that outline the progress.
This will be very doable for the proper projects, for sure. Especially after we’ve finished the discovery process.
“You’ve been reading Piccalilli since:”permalink
These answers really surprised me:
| Year | Percentage |
|---|---|
| 2018 | 10.56% |
| 2019 | 6.11% |
| 2020 | 12.78% |
| 2021 | 8.33% |
| 2022 | 8.89% |
| 2023 | 12.78% |
| 2024 | 22.78% |
| 2025 | 13.89% |
| Blank | 3.89% |
From some of the qualitative answers, it seems quite a few folk’s entry point was The Index, which is also rather surprising.
The fact a lot of people arrived last year doesn’t surprise me too much because we invested a lot in a redesign and refocus. That work continues so I expect years on or after 2024 will continue to outweigh the years before that.
This extra comment made me smile too:
I’ve followed you since the beginning and you haven’t disappointed me yet, keep going and I can’t wait to see more.
“What best describes your job role?”permalink
| Role | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| Front-end developer | 111 | 30.33% |
| Full stack developer | 73 | 19.95% |
| UI Designer | 47 | 12.84% |
| UX Designer | 41 | 11.20% |
| Consultant | 16 | 4.37% |
| Project owner/manager | 16 | 4.37% |
| Content Designer | 16 | 4.37% |
| Back-end developer | 15 | 4.10% |
| Leadership | 14 | 3.83% |
| Project manager | 10 | 2.73% |
| Marketer | 7 | 1.91% |
There’s no huge surprises here. It’s nice to see so many designers. I’d quite like our content to appeal to people in leadership too, so it looks like we’ve got a lot of work to do there!
“What sort of content that we post on Piccalilli do you like?”permalink
| Answer | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| Detailed guides | 64 | 16.71% |
| Specific technologies such as HTML and CSS | 56 | 14.62% |
| Techniques such as progressive enhancement | 53 | 13.84% |
| Short snappy posts | 50 | 13.05% |
| Link posts to other people’s articles | 40 | 10.44% |
| Open working projects | 36 | 9.4% |
| Newsletter | 33 | 8.62% |
| Reality check | 32 | 8.36% |
| Front-end challenges club | 18 | 4.7% |
| Other | 1 | 0.26% |
Not too many surprises here. I was half thinking about investing more in reality check, but what’s holding me back on that stuff is fundamentally, it goes against everything I teach in terms of being the browser’s mentor, not its micromanager.
I am reasonably surprised at how many people like the detailed guides though, but then if I look at the most popular posts of all time, A (more) Modern CSS Reset, Styling Tables the Modern CSS Way, CUBE CSS, Making content-aware components using CSS :has(), grid, and quantity queries, How to write error messages that actually help users rather than frustrate them and A guide to destructuring in JavaScript all certainly qualify as that when I step back and think about it.
“What sort of content that we post on Piccalilli do you dislike?”permalink
Thankfully, the total count here is considerably less than the posts people liked 😅
| Item | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| Front-end challenges club | 22 | 26.51% |
| Link posts to other people’s articles | 17 | 20.48% |
| Short snappy posts | 15 | 18.07% |
| Newsletter | 7 | 8.43% |
| Open working projects | 5 | 6.02% |
| Specific technologies such as HTML and CSS | 4 | 4.82% |
| Other | 4 | 4.82% |
| Reality check | 4 | 4.82% |
| Detailed guides | 3 | 3.61% |
| Techniques such as progressive enhancement | 2 | 2.41% |
One thing I’m quite surprised about is is how many people dislike short snappy posts. Those are my absolute favourite to read and write, but everyone has their own preferences!
All in all, we want to do more, publish more and spend more time on Piccalilli in general. Your help enables thatpermalink
As we outlined last year, we’re moving iteratively on building Piccalilli as a publisher. This exercise is all part of the process.
A feeling that I’ve got is we’ve got the foundations in place to really push forward and expand what Piccalilli does as a publisher. I’d quite like to:
- Publish more guest posts
- Spend more time writing myself!
- Work on more video stuff
- Index, The Index so people can find cool links much easier
- Generally publish a lot more content that makes people better at their jobs
We’re a team of four though and in order to really invest our time in Piccalilli, we need to cover our own costs. Here’s how you can help us do that:
If we can cover our costs, we’d be in a position to go full time on Piccalilli across the board. Currently, we put around 25-30% of our combined time on Piccalilli. Imagine what we could do with 100%.
I’ll wrap up by thanking everyone who reads Piccalilli and for everyone who responded to our survey. You’re the best and we’ll continue to do the best possible for you.