It’s been, like, forever, since my last post in this series – feels like time to pick it up again and finish the series…

The suggestions in this post are focused on the “behind-the-scenes” elements of your site – to the untrained eye they may not be visible/obvious.

This post definitely sways towards the geek end of the spectrum (just a fair warning if that’s not your thing). However, even if you’re in management, it helps to understand these things for when you’re briefing your tech team.

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When I was working at WWF-Australia a lot of effort went into making the organisation’s key email communications as effective as possible. So I was delighted today to see that Mathew from Freshview has chosen the Futuremakers email template as a sample of good email design in his SitePoint article The Principles of Beautiful HTML Email. (Thanks Mathew!)

A lot of “behind the scenes” work went into making sure that the email format worked across all the popular web email software (esp. Hotmail and Gmail). But also we had very clear objectives for the content layout, which is what Mathew highlighted in his article.

P.S. the email was also featured previously in the Campaign Monitor email gallery, which is a great resource for reviewing best practice in email design – as well as providing some nice eye-candy ;)

• 9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers – Darren Rowse writes up his thoughts on the benefits of Twitter. His focus is specifically on bloggers, but still useful for anyone wanting some ideas as to why Twitter may be useful to them.
• what’s new on reddit: new features – reddit will soon support focused, private and semi-private reddits. I think this is important for orgs wanting to use del.icio.us except for the “public-ness” of it. We might see retooling of del.icio.us tools to support reddit if it takes off.
• Zookoda – An interesting looking (free) service – from what I can tell it takes an RSS feed and sends HTML email updates on that basis. Great for promoting your blog or creating quick email newsletters for your organisation. Will need to look into it some more…

(These links were posted to my del.icio.us feed between 19-Jan-2008 and 23-Jan-2008.)

• Zookoda – An interesting looking (free) service – from what I can tell it takes an RSS feed and sends HTML email updates on that basis. Great for promoting your blog or creating quick email newsletters for your organisation. Will need to look into it some more…
• NussbaumOnDesign Obama Vs. Clinton: What Their Web Sites Say About How They View You. – BusinessWeek – Nussbaum on Obama vs. Hillary on the web: “.. Hillary sees her supporters as a series of constituents with individual interests that she needs to meet and Barack sees his backers as members belonging to a mass movement. …”
• The more people you reach the more likely it is that you’re reaching the wrong people – “Who vs. how many.” I truly admire how Seth can distill an important idea into single sentence. Or two…

(These links were posted to my del.icio.us feed between 15-Jan-2008 and 17-Jan-2008.)