Thanks to everyone who joined our contest to choose the new ContestCanada mascot. After tallying 191 votes (comments), I can officially report that Earl the Squirrel is the winner, with 146 votes. Rene the raccoon has graciously accepted the will of the people. A winner (that’s you AT) of the $20 prize has been notified by email.

Hi Folks, we made some back-end updates to the site this morning. If you run into any odd behaviour on the site, please let us know through the contact us form. Otherwise, watch for today’s new batch of contests coming early this afternoon.

Hi All, due to some events going on there will be no new contest posts today. We’ll be back at it tomorrow with a fresh batch. Hope everyone is having a good start to the weekend.

I think it’s fair to say that we’ve always been among the ugly ducklings of web sites. We’ve been ok with that, though.

“It’s what’s on the inside that’s important,” we kept telling ourselves.

Sure, we had seemingly random bits of information strewn around in various places, a colour-scheme that might best be described as “meh”, and sidebar sections that seemed to stretch on for miles with only one or two words per line. Maybe “ugly” isn’t the right word, though. Perhaps “hap-hazard” is better. Either way, we didn’t worry about it too much because the site was functional and people kept coming back day after day.

And we’ve been pretty good at keeping a loyal audience over the 5+ years that we’ve been doing this. Our readers want new contests to enter every day, and we’ve been delivering them. Seven days a week. Fifty-two weeks per year. Even weekends and holidays don’t slow us down.

As long as people keep coming to the site, who cares what we look like?

Well, I guess we do. The truth is that first impressions mean a lot, and when someone came across our site from a Google search, we were not likely to impress them with the look that we had. Sure, if they took the time to look around and see how many contests we have and how valuable the visitor comments are, they’d likely come back, but there would be fairly sizable group of people that would take one look at our home page and move on. We want to reduce the size of that group.

So, after days of slaving away in the basement office, we have emerged with a new look! It’s still a work-in-progress, so there will continue to be changes, but we’re already pretty pleased with the difference. The updates also open the door for some more changes that we’ll be introducing in the next few weeks.

The site’s functionality should still be the same as what you’re used to, other than the fact that a few things like the Categories list and Recent Comments have moved to new locations. We moved the Recent Comments section to the bottom of the page because it takes up a lot of space and doesn’t really fit in the sidebar. What do you think of this? Do you often look at the Recent Comments? Should it be more prominent?

And, overall, what do you think? Have we gone from ugly duckling to swan? Or at least from ugly duckling to ugly duckling with a cute smile?

Please feel free to let us know in the comments.

The recent Canadian election has got us in a very democratic mood here at www.contestcanada.net. In particular, the issue that has been discussed a couple of times in the past few weeks is the handling of blog contests. In the past, we included them along with regular contests on the main page, but then we separated them onto their own page. The ongoing feedback we’ve been getting is that it would also be good to have an icon or button that clearly indicates that a particular listing is for a blog contest.

And so, after several minutes slaving over an on-line button-generator, this is what we came up with:

You’ll see this button on the site and in the newsletter each day, next to the little flags for Canada and the US.

Another thing that we’ve been hearing quite a bit lately is that some folks really don’t like the contests where you have to submit a photo or essay and then get your friends to vote for you. There are more and more of these in recent times as companies jump on the social media bandwagon. Sometimes these contests have pretty amazing prizes, so we definitely want to continue listing them. As John pointed out in a recent comment, “Sometimes the contests that require a little effort mean that the odds are that much better!”

So, in an effort to please everyone, we’ve added a button to clearly identify this type of contest:

And, lastly, because some people don’t like Facebook contests, we’ve added a button for that too. This is usually (but not always) pretty obvious from the contest URL, but an extra visual indicator can’t hurt:

One last thing on the subject of Blog Contests: My Little Review Corner has a new entry in a series of posts meant to explain the ins and outs of blog contests. This one is about Tweeting. Check it out.

Hopefully you’ll find the new buttons to be helpful. If you have suggestions on how this could be improved, please feel free to comment below. Or if you’d rather not make a public comment, you can also send a message through our contact form.

We had a pretty big discussion a few weeks ago about blog contests. Some people like them, and some people don’t. Regardless of which side of the fence you’re on, I think you’ll find this blog post from MyLittleReviewCorner interesting:

http://mylittlereviewcorner.wordpress.com/2011/04/30/how-to-enter-blog-giveaways/

Recently we’ve made some recent changes to the way blog contests are handled here at www.contestcanada.net, so I wanted to write quick explanation of the changes and the motivation behind them.

Previously, blog contests were mixed in with the regular contests. We normally focus on the larger contests, so generally we weren’t including a lot of the smaller blog contests. As you probably know, blog contests usually have smaller prizes and you usually have to tweet, “like” a page, or comment on the blog in order to get an entry. They also normally have much better odds of winning.

Over the past few months, a lot more of these blog contests have been submitted to us on a daily basis. It seems to be a growing trend, and since there are genuine prizes to be won, we’ve included more and more of them. Personally, I like the idea of having a 1-in-300 or 1-in-500 chance of winning, even if the prize is smaller.

Not everyone feels this way though, and we’ve received a number of complaints. Some people don’t like to bother with the smaller prizes, and some people don’t like the “work” of having to tweet a message or leave a comment. Fair enough.

So, the changes are as follows:

• Blog contests will no longer appear on the front page. We’ve moved them to a separate page: https://www.contestcanada.net/category/blog-contests/
• You can access this page any time by clicking the “Blog Contests” link in the black bar near the top of the page.
• Blog contests will still be included in the daily email
• We will be increasing the number of blog contests that are published each day

If you’re a fan of blog contests or you’re a blog owner who runs contests, I hope you’ll be happy to hear that we’re going to be including more of them. If you don’t like them, I hope you’ll be happy to hear that you won’t have to sort through them to find the regular contests that you’re looking for.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are welcome.

Friends, some of you may have received a malware notification when visiting this site over the last few days. And while we take pride in being a smidgeon more devious than the most devious minds, we’ve gotta own up to it: we were hacked, powned and owned. Probably by some bitter basement dweller who was feeling neglected by his cat. The result is that some links were added to our site that shouldn’t have been. None of our site visitors will be affected other than occasional groaning caused by our attempts at humour.

Thanks to the visitors who alerted us to the problem. Within nanoseconds we marshalled a crack team of freedom fighters and fixed the problem with the same fighting spirit that our Canadian ancestors used to repel the charioteers of Alexander the Great. That self-heralded team included Artman, a wise-cracking rogue with straight teeth; Keyzee, the brains behind the operation, and ContestC, a childish prodigy with a chronic fear of salt. All’s well now and for anyone who happens to be reading this, hey, thanks for stickin’ around.

Why would someone follow us? The only thing foolish enough to do so was this dog, and look what we did to him! But now, here we are, telling you about our new Twitter feed, thinking you’re so off-the-rails that you might even check it out.

Each and every contest that we post on ContestCanada.net will also show up as a tweet on our Contestcan Twitter feed. If you’re not using Twitter, you’re not missing anything – all the good stuff is still here, delivered with sardonic wit and the occasional typo.

You can find our Twitter feed here.

So, I sent some publicity head-shots to a talent agent and she told me I had “a fraction of Ernest Borgnine’s sex appeal”. That’s when i found my calling …. radio! Listen in tonight for a chat on all sorts of contest chatter as I join Carolyn Wilman’s (aka The Contest Queen) radio program. Check it out!

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/contestqueen/2009/04/07/Take-a-Look

Hi folks. Sorry we haven’t posted new contests yesterday or today. We’ve run into a problem with our publishing tools and we’re working out a fix with our hosting provider. We’ll be up and running again in a short while with a great new set of contests. In fact, it’ll be a freakin’ contest extravaganza!!