Have a Safe and Happy Holiday Season
Friday, December 22nd, 2006
As we’re getting ready to close up shop this afternoon for the final week of 2006, Bainbridge Studios would like to extend holiday wishes to all of our clients and colleagues. Thank you for a phenomenal 2006 and we’re looking forward to serving you in the coming year!
The Bainbridge Studios office will be closing at 3pm today and reopening Tuesday, January 2nd.
Homepage Backgrounds That Will Make Your Eyes Bleed
Friday, December 22nd, 2006
From time to time, media or consumer-oriented websites have sold their backgrounds (the area visible outside the main content of their homepage) for advertising. NewsDesigner.com points out two particularly painful-to-view examples today as retailer Kohls purchased ad space on the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Boston.com’s homepages. Bright, migraine-inducing red…
Lessons Learned Courtesy of Mother Nature
Tuesday, December 19th, 2006
The past five days have been rather harrowing for many of us here in the Pacific Northwest. The windstorms that swept through the region last Thursday night knocked out power to more than one million homes throughout Washington and Oregon. Aside from addressing the most basic issues such as maintaining food and shelter and avoiding the cold, Mother Nature also brought with her a test for businesses - dealing with the impact of the storm on technology, communication and more.
Here at my home office, from which the vast majority of all Bainbridge Studios work and communication emanates, the storm proved to be a particular test. Having been fortunate over the years, we’ve rarely been faced with any power outages lasting more than a couple minutes and Internet service outages have been few and far between (knock on wood).
Thankfully, we had pretty fair warning that this particular storm was coming and what could be expected as far as damage. By late Thursday afternoon, the winds and rain were significantly picking up and the lights began to flicker. Having finished up most of the day’s work, I went through a quick backup routine to get an additional set of all client/project files on a portal USB2 drive and then powered down the office server. Despite a few “blinks”, the power did in fact manage to stay on throughout most of Thursday evening, finally dropping off early Friday, around 1:15am.
Friday is what proved to be the true test of flexibility. We woke up to no power, no heat and (obviously) no Internet access. Given the seemingly slim prospects of the power being quickly restored that day, Dianne and I elected to head out of Seattle for the day, visiting with family in the burbs that were fortunate to have power.
Unfortunately, their DSL service was down.
What could have been a rather insane day of managing work, sans online access, turned out relatively painless. My Blackberry provided easy access to keep up on any/all incoming email and allowed me to inform clients of the day’s events and circumstances. That, paired with a relatively light work day (with only a couple minor deliverable deadlines to meet), made the potentially madding actually rather manageable.
I did find myself spending a good deal of Friday afternoon bouncing from cafe to cafe in search of a working WiFi connection to get a couple client email campaigns ready for delivery, but aside from that, managed to crank out a reasonably productive day in spite of the circumstances.
So what did I learn from last week’s experience? Planning is key. You never know when adverse circumstances (be it weather, accidents or any number of other factors completely out of your control) will impact your business, and it’s best to be prepared:
- Have flexible options for working from the road.
- Make sure your computer systems have working APC backup devices, to allow you to save files and properly shut down your computers in the event of a power outage (I discovered that my APCs didn’t hold up well when the power was lost).
- Have an email- and web-enabled phone or PDA that will give you access to email and necessary online services, and make sure that device works when the power or WiFi is down.
- Back up your data! Regardless of pending nature disasters, always maintain backup copies of your critical data. Ideally, that backup should be portable, so you can simply grab an external drive and take it with you.
- Finally, and probably most important of all, RELAX. No matter how frustrated and stressed you might be in that crisis moment, there are others out there dealing with a lot more. If you’ve taken the necessary steps to prepare yourself and your business for such adverse circumstances, you’ll be fine. Relax and enjoy the adventure.
A Great Holiday Video Greeting
Tuesday, December 19th, 2006
Six Apart, publishers of Movable Type and TypePad, two of the more popular blogging platforms, published a great holiday video greeting that’s definitely worth checking out. Credit to Coudal for the link.
Click here to view the clip on YouTube »
Muhammad Yunus on Simplicity
Thursday, December 14th, 2006
Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of Grameen Bank, in the current issue of Business 2.0:
“When you’re trying to solve a problem, always bring it back to the simplest formulation.”
Yunus was speaking specifically about Grameen’s microloans to individuals in impoverished nations, but that approach can be applied to many ventures, design included.
Adobe Announces Release of Photoshop CS3 Beta
Thursday, December 14th, 2006
For much of the (Mac-based) creative community, the official adoption of the new Intel-based Mac computers won’t be complete until the release of Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 as a Universal Binary sometime this coming spring. For those unfamiliar, a Universal Binary is a program format optimized to run on both older PowerPC-based Macs as well as the new Intel machines. Older (non-Universary Binary) software is capable of running on Intel Macs today, but performance in many cases (Photoshop in particular) leaves a lot to be desired.
Suffice to say, there’s a lot of excitement brewing today after Adobe announced that they’ll be releasing a beta version of Photoshop CS3 tomorrow (Friday, December 15th) for free download. The software will include a two-day preview period for non-CS2 users; those currently running CS2 and possessing a legit software license will be able to use the CS3 beta at least until the final, official release of the software in the spring.
MacWorld has a rundown on the release »
Introducing Coherence
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006
I’ve been a big fan of Parallels Desktop since it’s initial release. For the uninitiated, Parallels is a virtualization solution for Intel-based Macs that allows you to run multiple operating systems simultaneously within OS X. Thus, I can run Windows XP within it’s own self-contained window on my desktop, alongside by usual Mac software. It’s an excellent solution for those who prefer the Mac environment but may still need to run a few PC-only programs. Here at Bainbridge, we utilize Parallels to more easily test websites and HTML emails across both Mac and PC systems, all on one machine, all on the same screen.
This week, the fine folks at Parallels have upped the ante, releasing an ambitious Beta upgrade to Parallels. It includes a number of significant new features, including drag and drop copying (the ability to simply drag and drop files between operating systems).
What really caught my eye, and what I think will really impress a lot of other folks, is the introduction of Coherence, a Parallels framework that basically hides much of the extraneous Windows desktop, showing just the actively running window/programs. So, what’s the big deal? The big deal is that now you can literally run Internet Explorer, Outlook, Office 2007, etc. side by side with Safari, iLife, and more, without having to switch between desktops.
Checkout these screen caps taken on my MacBook Pro. The first features a neat trick for hiding/revealing the Windows XP toolbar (using it’s Auto Hide function) by tucking it under the OS X menu bar at the top of the screen. All of my XP software is just a couple clicks away, but I don’t have to fully jump back and forth betwen the two operating systems to access them.
The second screen cap below showcases the side-by-side effect; Internet Explorer 6 and Safari are both open onscreen and I can easily jump between the two.
More Email Marketing Stats Goodness
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006
Tis the season for email marketing research, it seems. MailChimp has posted a breakdown of open rates, click rates, bounces and unsubscribes for more than 30 million emails distributed by their system on behalf of their clients.
The results are broken down by industry (i.e., industry of the company from which the emails were sent). The best of the bunch? Legal services, with an open rate of 42.62%. The worst? The insurance industry, clocking in at an impressively low 14.75%. The only category lower was a catch-all of more obscure senders, aptly labeled “Other” (this group checked in a 9.38% open rate).
Check out the complete statistical goodness here »
Death and Business
Tuesday, December 12th, 2006
I found out today that one of our clients passed away suddenly last month.
A fit, energetic man in his forties. The kind of person you never expect to be “the first to go.”
We hadn’t worked directly with this particular client and his company (of which he was a co-owner) since redesigning their website last year and I hadn’t had contact with anyone from their office in some time.
Hearing news of his death, it certainly got me thinking about business planning and addressing the “what ifs?” that so many of us don’t want to consider. Particularly for those of us that are either self-employed, entrepreneurial or running our own small businesses, planning for things like an untimely death is a significant issue (e.g., what happens to the business? To the client base? To employees?).
It’s not the kind of thing most of us want to consider, but it’s clearly important to do so. Sometimes we just need to be reminded of that…
Breakdown of Web-Based Email Clients
Tuesday, December 12th, 2006
A number of posts have been floating around the email marketing blogosphere earlier today, detailing the latest demographic reports and trends on the email marketing front, particularly use of web-based email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and others.
For those unfamiliar with the pitfalls of designing HTML-based marketing emails, web-based services like Hotmail and Gmail are often the bane of many a designer’s existence. Their often difficult handling of CSS styling and other contemporary coding techniques leads (in many cases) to HTML-coded “mash-ups” of sorts, as the designer is left to work his or her way through a variety of hacks and other work-arounds in order to insure that the design of the email appears to the end user as close as possible to the way it was intended to look when originally designed.
One particularly interesting note is that perpetually Beta Gmail (are they ever going to lift the “Beta” tag from that service?) only ranks fourth among web-based email services, despite probably getting a majority of the press since it’s initial release.
So what beat out, Gmail, you ask? Well, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and…. drumroll please…. MySpace!
States EmailMarketingReports.com:
“As of November, 2006, the most popular email websites (based on US Internet usage and in descending order of popularity) were: mail.yahoo.com, mail.myspace.com and hotmail.com.”
While MySpace has clearly become the 800-pound gorilla of the social networking circles, one might not initially consider them in the context of web-based email providers. Of course, considering their 70 million + user base, perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised after all.
Click here for the full rundown of the latest numbers on email usage »