Email Campaigns and Blasts has been popping up more and more often with a number of our clients. As you know we’re HUGE advocates of modern, fresh design and clean, standards-complaint code. Sending HTML emails is just like building a webpage right? Wrong. In this post I’ll go over some of the big hiccups we’ve run into, and ways we skirt around them.
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Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category
Email Marketing: What Century are We In?!?
The Top 5 Awful Site Designs That Amuse the WebpageFX Office
Terrible Site Design
Every once in awhile a really awful site design comes along and makes you laugh, cry, or want to punch your monitor.
You find these sites quite often when you work at a web developer. We share them amongst ourselves and share a laugh.
Here’s a list of the top 5 worst website designs we’ve seen, in order from bad to worst.
Extra! Extra! Our Blog Looks Like a Newspaper!
As I mature as a designer I’m seeing more and more the great importance of doing some research before jumping into a design. A classic example of this is our very own blog (yes, the one you’re reading right now!).
The planning that went into creating this blog was probably a lot more than one would expect. Xander and I sat down one fateful sunny afternoon (we won’t discuss how cold it was outside) and discussed what we wanted to accomplish with the blog, who our target was, how we would reach them and still push the envelope for inspirational creativity.
We boiled it down to two options: we could focus on just utilizing our blog to gather links and boost internet presence, or we could create a design that would mix the blogging world with traditional newspapers. The latter built a better argument. A large number of our clients (consequently also our target market) aren’t you’re typical “Blog Readers”, so our angle would be to try and bridge the gap between something they were comfortable with: reading a morning paper over some hot java, and something we were comfortable with: pining over blog posts looking for the latest tips and tricks.
Preparing for the future?
Microsoft is at it again, trying to keep up with the times yet make everyone happy. Version 8 of Internet Explorer is set to launch while a lot of the population doesn’t yet know that different web browsers even exist.
In Microsoft’s newsletter published yesterday, they warn of compatibility issues between companies’ websites and their new-and-improved browser. For those that know the details of past IE versions, you know that in so many words they came out and made some pretty bold statements.
Let’s start with the alarming red warning text that really gets the interest going.
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How You Became A Master Online Copywriter in 5th Grade
Me outlining in 5th grade
Everybody remembers 5th grade.
My teacher was Mrs. Gunning at St Joseph Elementary in Dallastown, PA. She loved outlining.
We outlined everything. Our science books, our history books, sometimes even our math books. She couldn’t get enough of it!
“When am I ever going to use this?” I grumbled as I scribbled roman numeral after roman numeral in my marble notebook.
It turns out that a search-engine-optimized web page is set up exactly like a 5th grade textbook outline.
And if you arrange your pages using this template, Google will understand your content more easily and you’ll boost your rankings.
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10 Tips for Every Web Designer
After attending a few web design conferences this year (namely An Event Apart and Future of Web Design) I saw it fitting to put together a few tips that I’ve picked up, both technical and procedural. I feel these conferences have greatly changed my view on how websites are and should be created, and hope this list of tips can help strengthen my fellow web designers. So without further blabber, here they are:
1. The Magic of 62.5
Let’s start off with an easy technical tip. If in your stylesheet you set the font size of your body element to 62.5% your text will render on most browsers (we’ll get to IE6 in a minute) as 10px. You might be saying, “10 pixels?? Why is that so special?.”
Doing this allows you to create fluid layouts out of practically any design. With a base value of 10px you can now set every measurement in your CSS in em‘s. Have a wrapper container that needs to be 1000px?
Well, now you can set it to 100em and the browser will display it just as planned, but if a user decides to increase their text size, your entire layout will grow respectively, essentially creating a “page zoom” that doesn’t break your containers.
For an example of what this looks like, check out one of our recently launched mini-sites: Beaujolais Duboeuf. Below is the code that you can put into your CSS, including an IE6 rule to balance out all the browsers.
body { font-size: 62.5%; }
* html body { font-size: 10px; }
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