Dionysus approached us with a brief to realign the website to better leverage the online medium. The site features a full CMS implementation, user registration, search, a blog, events calendar, discussion forum and a photo gallery.

This project for Dionysus went from initial consultation through information architecture, interface design, HTML/CSS coding, CMS implementation (Joomla!), content insertion and training.

The client was an absolute pleasure to work with, and we wish Irene, Seth, Kathy, Angie, QJ,  Jeannette and everyone else all the best with their new website.

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How to resize an image online from Ross Allchorn on Vimeo.

So many designers these days are producing “questionnaires” that ask your favourite colour, do you want a symbol in your logo, what type of font do you like? All of these things -sorry to say- are not up to the company owner. They’re not up to the designer to impart their opinion on either. These factors are established by research.

• Researching the the client’s company
• Researching the industry
• Researching the competition
• Researching the end user/customer

This is where you draw your conclusions from. Not from the company owner’s nor the designer’s “opinion”.

Design is about communication

Nothing more, and nothing less. I sometimes get irritated when people say things as obvious as that to me, and while you might agree and get back to your normal way of doing things; take a minute and think about it.

You’re designing to communicate a message “buy this”, “subscribe here”, “register now”, “enquire”, and if your design efforts are not focussed around those objectives, you might as well be putting lipstick on a pig.

“Don’t try to be original. Just try to be good.”
Paul Rand – 1914-1996

There are a lot of Paul Rand video clips and tributes going around the design community at the moment, and for sure, he deserves all the credit he can get.

There is one very important message I get from him where I can sense his frustration in trying to get his message across. It’s summed up in that quote above, and what it really comes down to is that people need to first become capable of the basics of communication before they can start innovating. Walk before you can run in other words.

According to Wikipedia:

“The end-of-life support for Internet Explorer 6 is July 13, 2010″

That alone tells me that it is an actively supported means of people accessing websites for at least another 10 months.

A lot of opinions seem to be around the lack of standards support by the browser and I don’t dispute this fact, but you also can’t look beyond the fact that there are still users out there that are stuck with it. Unfortunate, but true.

Just so you’re clear on my position on the matter; we will support IE6 until there is what I deem to be a sufficiently low enough percentage of visitors using it. There will be exceptions in cases where I know for a fact that the audience of the site/intranet is closed enough and mandated to use a newer or different browser, but by rule of thumb, we will support it.

My clients’ reputations are important to me!

According to w3schools, last month 13.6% of users were still on Internet Explorer 6.

For technology to cause their image to possibly be tarnished to approximately 13% odd of their visitors is simply unacceptable. Especially when those possible problems are avoidable through producing “gracefully degradable” sites where necessary and providing code hacks (a sad reality my geek friends) to have them rendered properly.

Really people… if you’re not in the web design and development industry, and you can’t update your browser, then you probably wouldn’t give a toss about anything besides the fact that you’re inconvenienced by a breaking website! In my eyes, thats not good business.

A good coder should make a site work in all required browsers

The discussion often pops up in forums I frequent, and it’s usually someone having a hard time getting something to render consistently. While I do empathise with them (I have been there too), you need to suck it up, figure it out and make it work… it is your job, do it properly!

Usually someone with a bit more experience will chime in that it’s not that hard when you know how. Those people -in my opinion- are the true professionals. Not the guys whining about it and trying to get everyone to stop supporting it.

Upgrading your browser is necessary

All the above being said, don’t get the impression that I think the www should stagnate and indefinitely be stuck with archaic systems like IE6. There is a world beyond simple browsing, and the likes of the Mozilla Foundation, Google, Opera, Apple and even Microsoft themselves have forged on and created some far more modern, more secure, more user friendly and just better browsers.

Here is a list of browsers I recommend:

• Mozilla Firefox (my choice)
• Opera
• Apple’s Safari (available for Windows machines too)
• Google Chrome
• Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8

Without the arduous task of printing, folding, inserting and licking, and the time/cost associated with it, it makes perfect sense to make good, regular use of email marketing.

We are often tasked with the setup, design and distribution of email newsletters, promos and notifications to our client’s clients/prospects, and it’s important that the task is approached properly. What I mean by properly is that it needs to be sent through the correct means, and most importantly… measured!

5 steps to effective email marketing

Below is a diagram illustrating a workflow for effectively creating your client database through to reporting. Followed with an explanation of each step.

1. Database setup

There are a number of ways to collect subscribers for your marketing database. Depending on your business, you can normally start by looking at existing client communication conduits (accounting systems, CRM systems, comment slips etc.).

Compile a list in a spreadsheet with the information needed to communicate personally and effectively. Usually the following would suffice:

• Name
• Surname
• Email Address
• Mobile Number
• Any self defined group (region, demographic etc.)

A subscription facility should be placed on your website as this is an entirely self sufficient method of collecting subscribers. You can also acquire subscribers offline. An example could be a restaurant where comment slips are created with an “opt in to our email marketing” on it. These would need to be manually captured, but certainly worth the effort.

All of these methods should feed into a central database. This database is normally located on the system of choice for distribution (explained below), but backups are always a necessity.

2. Design & Coding

This is an area where most design people trip up on themselves and either incorrectly create their actual marketing materials as a print item (the web is a fluid, dynamic medium), or have the code generated by something like Dreamweaver/Frontpage and the end result is often an illegible mess on some of the recipient’s side.

Coding email newsletters (or any broadcast for that matter) is a tricky task, with many target mail clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, Yahoo Mail etc.). Most of which render your mail differently and results can be horrific if not coded to accommodate their quirks. For professional results, we currently follow this method of creating the emails and then test thoroughly.

There are also spam concerns, so awareness of what practices could be flagged as spam could effect the end result of the campaign.

3. Email distribution

Sending your emails is a task best handled by a dedicated service like Campaign Monitor, Aweber or Graphic Mail. To send your mailers professionally as well as having the ability to receive detailed reports on your campaigns after they have run is very important in your marketing efforts. The costs are nominal (either per send or per recipient in your database per month).

There are some other reasons to make use of one of these services rather than your mail client (Outlook etc.). One of the most important of which is that you could send too many from a private mail account, and actually get your mail server blocked for spam. Your normal day to day emails not going through to people (spam blocked)… now thats a productivity killer if I’ve ever heard of one.

4. Reporting

Now your campaign has been sent. It was created properly to a database you collected, using the correct tools which automatically track any links, how many people opened them, how many bounced, how many were not opened, how many people unsubscribed, how many email addresses were no longer active etc.

All of this information is compiled in a report, from which the efficacy of the campaign can be measured.

5. Rinse & repeat

The process is complete. You likely have a re-usable template to use for your next broadcast. Your database is getting bigger. Import some more subscribers captured outside of your online efforts, change your message, and send another campaign when the time is right. Too often is likely to annoy prospects, but the frequency all depends on what you’re sending, and to whom.

I hope this gives you a clearer picture as to how an effective and professional email broadcasting campaign should be carried out. This was a very simple example, and you can implement a number of other factors into the mix. Facilities for your recipients to suggest the mailer to a friend/friends, viral mailers and so much more. All of which would make this post far too long, but if you’re interested, feel free to drop us a line.

We’re currently reconstructing a customer’s corporate brochure because the designer of which “can’t find” the originals. Now we have to scan in the document (11 pages including a gold foil print on the cover page), re-type it, extract all the images where we can, clean them up and make them ready for their website.

This is not the cheapest exercise, and if I were the client, I’d probably bill the original designer what we charge him.

The quality of the images will never be as good as the originals for print, but luckily for him this is a web exercise and the printers seem to have retained the original litho plates. If he wants to make changes however… well, there he has another problem… and expense!

Are your digital assets in safe hands? If not, I recommend getting ahold of them as soon as possible and making some good solid backups and put them in your safe.

Don’t allow your assets to be held ransom

Another concern in this industry is the type of designer/firm that chooses to retain the original files in the vain belief that they can hold them ransom for a fee, or keep the client this way for future design/print work.

I personally believe this to be underhanded, and we never retain these materials due to the fact that we prefer to retain clients based on the value we provide, both in the form of service, skill and the return they get on their investing their money in proper solutions.

Check the fine print. If your service provider wants to claim full copyright and only hand over the finished product and none of the raw Photoshop files, then either find out what he/she wants in exchange for that ownership, or find another service provider. Simple as that.

Perhaps this will spark some debate amongst designers that disagree with me, but please keep it friendly, and lets discuss things nicely, even if you want to banish me to the depths of hell for this post. Remember, the comments are moderated.

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The Collective Branding and Design are one of our longer standing clients. Starting out when the principal designer -Leigh Dyson- was still operating as a sole proprietor under the name of Dyson Design, we have grown alongside The Collective and together have done a number of collaborative works over the years.

When Leigh contacted me last week, she expressed interest in getting a blog online for The Collective and within a short timeframe (less than a week) we managed to create a unique blog interface for the site. Working off our original WordPress installation and the initially solid code foundation, we upgraded their installation to the latest version and integrated the blog neatly with minimal plugins.

Personally I think it came out quite nicely.

Keen to know your opinion if you have one – introducing The Collective Branding and Design Blog.