10 tips for designing email newsletters that earn their keep

March 30, 2009  FILED TO: Business Management, Web Design

Many small businesses are starting to realise how important it is to keep in touch with their customers and that one easy, low-cost way to do this is by sending email newsletters. However, many newsletters fall short when it comes to meeting legal requirements, attracting users to take action and providing feedback to the business. Here are some tips to help you create newsletters that give back.

         
Continue Reading

File Juicer to the rescue

March 27, 2009  FILED TO: Software

I had a client come to me recently wanting a redesign of an existing website.  This website included a set of photo galleries.  These photo galleries had been made using a Flash template and didn’t really fit in with the new design.  She also wanted to add more galleries.   Unfortunately, the original Flash files were lost in history and so were the electronic versions of these photos so I could neither extract the photos nor create new galleries like them.  I searched for many alternatives but could see only two that were available: use the existing Flash files and add new photos in a different format (a bit ugly), or rescan all of the original photos and create new galleries (time consuming as there are lots of photos).  Fortunately, I happened across a site today which solved all of the problems: it lead me to File Juicer.

         
Continue Reading

Intelligent hyperlinking

March 19, 2009  FILED TO: Web Design

istock_000004926002xsmallIn the good old days, when the Internet first began, we had to train users how to use it. A standard was created which dictated that hyperlinks (links to another page) would be underlined. So Internet users were trained to recognise a piece of text that they could click on to go somewhere else. Somehow that wasn’t enough for amateur web page developers, though (and in those days, there weren’t any professional web designers) so the idea of a link was enforced with the words “click here”, often in big, bold, red, flashing letters. In the decade or two since, the Internet has evolved, and so has its users – they’ve been trained to recognise a link, even if it’s not flashing. They can also recognise a link without the words “click here”. And with savvy users, an industry built on search engine optimisation and businesses that exist only in the virtual world, it’s become more important to think about hyperlinks and the best way to present them.

         
Continue Reading

Three years on; five lessons learned

February 27, 2009  FILED TO: Business Management

It’s been a little over three years since I sat nervously at a borrowed desk and visited the Business Victoria website to register “Spiral Designs” as a business name.  I had recently returned from 18 months’ living in Europe, where I worked as a programming contractor.  At some point during that stay I decided that I never wanted to work in the corporate circus again, I would work for myself and help small businesses. I had a business plan, a mentor and some ideas but no guarantees – that I would be successful nor that I would actually enjoy it.

         
Continue Reading

Site designed by SPIRAL DESIGNS. Copyright © 2010 Pamela Ueckerman.
This site is optimised for Firefox and hosted on Wordpress.

Bring Down IE6