Congratulations to our in house Creative Director and Canadian Artist, Mandy Budan. She is an inspiration and a mentor to other Graphic Artists and we are proud to have her leading our creative team.
This is a superb accomplishment in the area of abstract acrylic art. Her work will be displayed at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, who include The Group of Seven and other prominent Canadian artists in their permanent collection.
An HTML file can be displayed by both a web email client and a desktop email client such as Microsoft Outlook. There are many email clients, each with their own defaults for displaying content, not to mention the different browsers available. For that reason it can be difficult to predict what a design will look like. So a very important rule of thumb is to TEST TEST and TEST on all browsers and email clients.
Going back in time when tables were used for design.
Unfortunately most email clients are not in par with the newest CSS styling standards. So it is extremely unpredictable how a floating div will look like in Outlook Express vs Yahoo Mail. Of coarse you can test this out, but as mentioned earlier, there are various email clients you probably haven’t even heard of so the safest bet is sadly, to design using tables. This really means going back to HTML 1.0 and table design using table attributes and the long lost <font> tag. Yes, this is extremely painful, as you will have to wrap these attributes to almost every line in your content!
Keep it simple stupid! KISS … a designers all time favorite rule!
Since you cannot simply use embedded CSS, even if it is inline, the nice image you originally used as a CSS background, will have to be replaced with an actual image within your HTML code. So when a design is created, it must be kept as simple as possible.
Be clear about limitations to your client so that expectations are met.
With the latest Flash techniques, Ajax and Web Gadgets, the perception that anything can be done on the web is seeping its way around the non-programmer community. So when a client wants an email that has collapsing content, dynamic images or animated pop-ups, you have to let them know that this is simply not possible. Telling them their limitations before they start dreaming up a flashy email marketing campaign can save a lot of hassle and miscommunication. Remember, if they don’t see what they want, it is YOUR fault.
Get a sense for who will be managing the email content to avoid your work from being damaged.
With so many HTML builders or do it yourself website makers, many individuals who use these off the shelf products truly believe they are familiar with HTML coding. HTML has become such a buzz word that it seems as long as you know how to change the content through a wizard, you know what is going on in the back-end. So beware of others editing your work.
A while back I wrote a section on the status of META tags and I was not surprised to learn the greedy history behind it’s use and how today it is out of the picture when it comes to rankings.
What was more infuriating was the vast number of websites still claiming that the key to rankings is the keyword META tag. Just below these statements there are usually a few ads conveniently placed to promote their so called “SEO Services”, which remain hidden partly because they don’t know what is going on themselves. A month of research on SEO for the sake of learning what others are saying or doing about it, enlightened me to the sad reality that most of these services are quick profit making schemes that care nothing for long-term success of their clients.
So here is a video from Google themselves explaining quite shortly the use of keywords. Let’s just hope the showcases of lectures and information coming from Google is true.
I recently began testing a clients Web Portfolio for rankings, so when I typed in their first name in the top three search engines, the first result was always a Facebook user with with the same name as my client. When I clicked on this user to see who exactly she was, her profile picture was a professionally taken model shot and she had over 500 friends! I was tempted to tell my client to send a friendly "poke" to that user to obtain friend status with this top ranking user.
So whether you hate it or not, Facebook is huge and probably here to stay for a while. If you haven’t already started taking advantage of it, signing up as soon as you finish reading this is a start. Here is a pretty astonishing chart showing just how large the gap between other social mediums rank against Facebook. On top of that, with the aquisistion of Friend Feeder (Twitter’s competition) and a launch of Facebook Lite , who knows how much Facebook will dominate in the future.
For those who are just getting into the twitter scene, here is a great Twitter Guide. It contains tons of information for the absolute newbie, to those seeking to use twitter on a professional level.
With so many social sites to keep up with, a profile picture has become a stamp representing us in ways we don’t even expect. Most of us choose casual pictures usually considering whether the picture flatters us or not. But a profile picture can go a long way when describing the person you are. It also can be surprising how it affects one of the most important parts of your website, TRAFFIC! But like all new trends, testing and benchmarking is the best way to figure out this mystery.
If you are selling your services, seeking employment, or simply trying to get known on the web, then your profile picture should be your brand. There is a good article on just this concept outlining how important consistency is. The constant uprising of social sites have geared the web into a casual state with more people leaning away from glamor shots and becoming more comfortable posting natural, funny or interesting pictures.
Either way those who want to read your blog, take your advice or use your services want to feel comforted by the human side of your profile. So investing a little more time choosing an apropriate profile picture that let’s others see the smart, savvy or funny side of you, is definitely worth the time.
I was asked by a client how to use META tags to boost up their website rankings. At first I thought the answer was obvious, but when I stopped to think, I started to doubt my knowledge on the subject. So with my good friend Google, one litre of coffee and my determination, I set out to learn a little more about META element tags and their status quo.
The META element started off in the 90’s as a classification method for search engines to index webpages. However, in the early 2000’s, the keywords attribute of the META tag, almost if not completely lost support from all the major search engines due to spamming and unscrupulous misuse.
Today, there is mixed information on whether search engines support the META tag or not. The consensus seems to be that since search engines implement such advanced algorithms for crawling a website, more weight is placed on content within the web page rather than on META tags.
The Web has also seen a growth in standardization since the early 90’s with the development of the W3C and The Resource Description Framework, a family of W3C specifications originally designed as a metadata data model. This by the way, is definitely something to look into if you plan to dig deeper into the methods used for indexing web pages.
So, simply adding meta tags will not magically rank a website at the top of search results. It will however be used for search result pages as links or descriptions of your site at minimum so discarding them is not what I am implying at all. The reality is that content fuels search engines. Content-rich websites with descriptive text that incorporate words (keywords) that are relevant to the site’s topic or theme. Simply having a well structured document with an appropriate hierarchy of information, can do so much more for your rankings than META tags alone.
With the advent of digital photography, the amount of stock images online has become limitless and for a few years now, there have been specialized sites catering to specific industries. The problem with stock images is not that they are scarce, but that effective images are hard to find. And by this I mean pictures that don’t fit into the Sears Catalog category.
The fact that optical technologies and photography equipment saw a steep curve in improvement only means that the average Joe can now afford a professional SLR at higher resolutions. A high resolution image does not necessarily mean it is a good picture. In fact, higher megapixel camera’s are not always better. And that is the problem with stock images. True photography brings out certain moods or feelings using various aspects of colour, lighting and positioning techniques.
It’s a shame it takes a long time to simply search for images that don’t look fake or out of date. Even buying a high end camera to take your own shots may be worth a try if it is more customized to your content and if you are willing to put some time aside to learn at minimum the technical aspects of photography. As the old cliché states “A pictures is worth a thousand words”. So if a user lands on your page and the limbic system of their brain has been stimulated because of beautiful imagery, it was worth the effort.
Congratulations to our in house Creative Director and Canadian Artist, Mandy Budan. She is an inspiration and a mentor to other Graphic Artists and we are proud to have her leading our creative team.
