Announcement!

As you know, I've been working on our website. After months of shuffling between various file sharing sites, I decided to purchase a domain name, a website template and have everything hosted all in one place. I've put it off for months because I didn't want to incur any expenses unless it was absolutely necessary. But I feel the time has come to take the plunge.

As you might imagine, logging in and out of all those various free pages to make changes was taking quite a chunk of time. And now that we are at nearly 100 sellers, it's becoming increasingly time consuming so from the administrative aspect I felt it was necessary to consolidate everything.

As we've grown, it has been my objective to have a professional looking site to help promote all of our businesses. I sure appreciate your patience as I have tried one thing after another. It's been interesting trying to work with all the free sites as each of them operates differently and each has different limitations. It was wonderful to have the free graphics from Shabby Jen but her freebies are only available for blogs, not actual websites. So you get a little bit of the picture as to why things have changed a few times while we have been growing so rapidly. But now we finally have a permanent, consolidated and beautiful site at http://www.fridayfleamarket.net/

I hope you'll go over and take a look at all the changes. It's really amazing! Big thanks to Pink Parasol for the red polka dot, 3 column template at a very reasonable rate! I know several of you do graphic design work so please don't be offended that I didn't come to you. Each of you has such incredible talent and I wouldn't want any to feel that I choose one over the other. So I choose someone that I've worked with before and is not affiliated with the FFM.

Before you run off to play at our new site =} I have to address the dreaded issue of finances. It's not my objective to make a profit from our FFM site - I want you to know that right off the top. I've absorbed all the costs myself for as long as I possibly could. You fabulous gals don't know this but I've had to hire someone for a couple hours a week to help out with some of the things involved in being the admin of our FFM site. As a homeschool mom with my own website to run, I just don't have the time to do all the things that I wish I could. There's also the monthly fee that pappashop charges for hosting our site, the purchase of the template, etc.

The horrid bottom line is that I now have to charge a small fee to sign up for the FFM. I've broken down the costs and if we remain with this many sellers, everyone would only need to pay about $2 per month. While I hate to charge anything, we sure couldn't rent storefront space (with all the advertising we get) for $2 a month! I hope that you all understand and will continue to be part of the FFM. It pains me to do this but I want to grow our businesses as best they can and I really feel that a few growing pains are worth the growth! So beginning December 1st, if you want to remain on the FFM site, you'll need to purchase your spot. I have offered both a 6 month spot for $12 and a 12 month spot for $18. I will contiue to search out the best possible advertising for us, promote your sites and handle any FFM site maintenance, answering your questions and provide help where ever I can.

Please stop over to OUR site, take a look around and secure your spot for the holiday shopping season! ((hugs)) to each of you!!

Blessings... polly