Happy Holidays
As another year draws to a close I get a chance to reflect on the months past. It was quite the successful year for the CV Web Posse with lots of new members, awesome presentations and a general positive feeling in the air. I want to say thanks to everyone who participated or helped out this year and for making the Posse a recognized voice for Vancouver Island business and technology. We look forward to a new year full of community development, connection with our members and personal growth through a number of professional meetings and workshops. To help the Posse evolve we ask that you take a moment to fill out our annual web survey.
CV Web Posse Annual Survey
Last years survey was a big success and helped steer the direction for 2009. We are now holding our monthly presentation nights at North Island College which has worked out really well and I want to thank them for their ongoing support. Also, thanks to Campaign Monitor for supporting the Posse with distribution of our newsletters. In keeping with last years tradition I present you with our Annual Web Survey.
CV Web Posse Annual Survey 2009
Please take a few minutes to complete the survey so we can get a better idea of who our members are and what we can do better in 2010. The results will be collected and shared with the group in the new year. Thank you for making 2009 a great success and we look forward to seeing you in 2010. If you have any questions please contact us via email info@cvwebposse.com or follow us on Twitter – twitter.com/cvwebposse.
Speak Human
In November Eric Karjaluoto of SmashLab visited the Comox Valley to speak to the Posse about his new book Speak Human (Outmarket the Big Guys by Getting Personal). If you’re looking for some smart reading on how to approach marketing for your business and enjoy a common sense view on business then I recommend picking up a copy here.
Eric enjoyed his visit to the Comox Valley and posted a YouTube video about his visit.
Happy Birthday CV Web Posse
The CV Web Posse is a group that I started just over a year ago with the desire to connect with others in the local tech community. I knew that I wasn’t the only person doing web design here in the Comox Valley and thought it would be fun to meet with other people in the industry and see what would come of it. Before I started freelancing fulltime I worked in Victoria with Number 41 Media. I was an eager designer and front-end developer with a good team spirit and the desire to learn from the others. I loved hanging out with the all team around the office, the programmers, the project managers and especially the other designers. Both Rich Farr and Mark Delamere were instrumental in helping to shape my career as a web designer, coder and person. We would talk about everything from work to music and movies to ideas and theory.
After moving away from Victoria in 2007 and working under Architexture in my home based office for a year I started to get pretty lonely and antsy working in rural Royston so I decided it was time to find some officespace. I wanted to get out of the house and start better connecting with my clients and other people in the industry. After making a few local connections I thought it would be fun to put together a “group” and make it somewhat official by giving it a “name”. I decided on the CV Web Posse because it was fun and I didn’t want it to come across as too serious or formal, just a group of like minded folks who happen to make cool things on the internet.
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Email Standards Project
Architexture helps clients get their online marketing and email campaigns off the ground. We offer great looking email marketing campaigns tailored to a businesses brand with results that traditional media cannot measure. Through a well crafted HTML email you can reach out to your customers directly like you never have before. Simply put, HTML email gets results. Recent studies have shown that email marketing can provide a better return for each dollar spent than any other direct marketing channel.
But what does this all mean if what your customers are viewing looks different in every email client? Suddenly your well crafted, professional looking and visually stunning email falls apart and frankly looks like crap. Crafting an HTML email that renders correctly on most email clients is a delicate process which typically involves extra coding and a lot of guesswork.
The web has really matured over the past number of years and if there is any industry right now that provides opportunity, it is the web. With that maturity comes the responsibility of ensuring usability should not be pushed to the wayside and standards focused development should be at the top of any companies list of priorities. Having a resource like the WC3 works great for web standards and helping to ensure the long-term growth of the web, but what about email? Lets introduce the Email Standards Project.
The Email Standards Project is attempting to follow the example of the Web Standards Project, but for email clients, web and desktop-based to try and make HTML email creation less hit and miss process.
Email Standards Project
The Email Standards Project is about working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email. The project was formed out of frustration with the inconsistent rendering of HTML emails in major email clients.
Our goal is to help designers understand why web standards are so important for email, while working with email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently. This is a community effort to improve the email experience for both designers and readers alike.
Web standards make sense for email
- It removes the guess work from email design
- Faster loading and reduced bandwidth consumption
- Makes your email accessible to all
Other Initiatives
Fix Outlook is a new initiative using Twitter to spread the word of Microsoft’s decision to avoid using a browser to render HTML emails in place of a word processor. This immediately took standards-based email design off the table, forcing designers to abandon web standards for tables and font tags.
Microsoft have confirmed they plan on using the Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.
This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more. Want proof? Here’s the same email in Outlook 2000 & 2010.
Here is an comparison of Outlook 2000 vs. Outlook 2010…Which would you prefer?
Futher Reading
Architexture – Light at the end of the Tunnel
E-mail is not a platform for design
If you’re business might be interested in trying out email marketing email Architexture today to schedule a demo.