We really appreciate the response of our readers to our questions yesterday about what you want to see at StumbleBlogger. A lot of you stopped by and told us exactly how you felt, and that is exactly what we wanted. We learned a lot and we are already taking action to give it to you. There is no sense in doing this if we don’t do our best to make the readers happy!

First, we have done a little redesign of the site. We have toned down the colors. We have changed the “graphics” while still keeping it simple. The new Stumbler motif at the top left is pretty unmistakable. We have made the comment font larger and have stopped forcing comment text to upper case. We are going to move the ads into one sidebar, leaving all of the navigation in the other.

We may change to a three-column format with both sidebars on the right, again with ads in only one sidebar at the far right, if we can find a theme in that configuration that we like and which is compatible with the current WordPress version. Because I want this site to be about content and not about a pretty photo in the header, I’m going to try to keep it simple. If we don’t change themes to one with a black font, we’ll at least go with a much darker gray on this one.

(UPDATE 3-2-08 : We found an excellent theme, did a bunch of customization, and now have a completely different look. The graphics (such as they are) are different, we have two right sidebars with ads in one and navigation in the other, and we think it’s cooler. We hope you like it, too.)

As much as we appreciate your comments on look and feel, the subject of content is more important to us. We hear the following loud and clear:

You want how-to posts, for things like adding videos and pictures to your SU blog pages, and how to use a little code to make your SU page more interesting.

You want more posts about how to use StumbleUpon to get the most out of it, whatever your aims, and the etiquette of social media sites in general.

You would like more posts about how StumbleUpon works under the hood. Harder, but we’ll get right on it.

You want more posts on social media in general, as long as they are applicable to the world of Stumblers.

I also think that we are going to try polls, so that we can get some votes going on part of these things. I need to find a good polling package (maybe Democracy) that I can put in the sidebar, maybe between the ads. I am also giving some consideration to using a magazine theme, with news and features, and multiple posts per day.

Most of all, keep those suggestions coming!