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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…

Filed Under » Small Business | Comments Off


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 »

Filed Under » Email Marketing | Comments Off


Flash vs. CSS Web Design

Monday, December 11th, 2006

Web design blog Fadtastic has an interesting editorial from a former Flash web developer on his reasons for moving from Flash-based website design to standards-compliant CSS design. Some of the points covered are fairly common points of argument in the Flash v. CSS debate (e.g., search engine optimization, accessibility issues for visually-impaired users, etc.), but the author goes on to make a number of interesting points.

One particular statistic of interest is his challenge to Adobe’s standard argument of 96%+ adoption rates for the Flash Player (Adobe, Flash’s publisher, contends that the vast majority of Internet users worldwide have the Flash plugin installed on their computers – allowing them to seamlessly view Flash-based content on websites. The author sites one particular German study of Internet users that suggests that little more than half of users (53.9%) have the Flash plugin installed on their computers.

Click here to read the full piece at Fadtastic »

Filed Under » Design/Development | Comments Off


Probably Not the Best Way to Distinguish Your Brand

Sunday, December 10th, 2006

…by ripping off/riding on the coattails of another prominent branding campaign. But hey, it’s been a rough year for Sony, so why not give it a shot.

Via TUAW.

Filed Under » Branding | Comments Off