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Welcome to October's ZooNews,
from Montreal
professional Web site design company Zoonini
Web Services.
So your customer mailing list is set up in Outlook and you're
ready to send out your latest email announcement. You've
put off getting a Web-based mailing list system in place
because your list is still relatively small and besides,
you think to yourself, you only send out announcements once
in a while.
You give the message a final once-over and, satisfied that
everything is ready to go, you hit "send" triumphantly.
And then a vast wave of horror washes over you, as you suddenly
realize that you've accidentally put all 150 of your recipients'
names and addresses in the To line of the message – instead
of the Bcc field.
Congratulations! You have now revealed the names and email
addresses of your 150 customers to each other.
A small business in my neighbourhood recently experienced
this nightmare; I was one of their customers affected. "I
nearly had a heart attack when we realized the email wasn't
sent in Bcc," the owner later admitted.
And it's a perfect example of why desktop
email programs like Outlook should never be used by
businesses to send out mass mailings. By comparison,
Web-based newsletter systems are designed so that this kind
of catastrophe can never occur, since each message comes
in to the recipient's inbox addressed to them individually.
Web-based announcement systems also have the benefit of
allowing subscribers to automatically sign up and unsubscribe – and
even update email addresses and other delivery preferences.
Just think – there's no need to tediously cut-and-paste
names and email addresses in an email program every time
you need to add, remove or update a subscriber. Most newsletter
systems also have the ability to send a branded HTML newsletter
that matches your corporate identity, with colours, logos
and other graphic elements that create a consistent and professional
look-and-feel.
There are many different types of email newsletter programs
to consider, from hosted systems such as Constant
Contact and AWeber to
software like PHPList which
can be installed on your Web server. PHPList has the added
benefit of being open-source (freely available for most uses)
and it's the program I recommend to many of my clients.
If you're interested in adding a Web-based mailing-list
system to your site, just
give
me a shout and
I'd be glad to discuss your needs.
Still not convinced that email newsletters are a worthwhile
endeavour in the first place? Check out my colleague A.
Charlotte Riley's article E-Newsletters
that work to
learn about the most common stumbling blocks companies face
when launching an e-newsletter, and get helpful tips on one
of today's biggest marketing trends.
Are ads for ringtones and pharmaceuticals flooding through
the inquiry form on your Web site from people with dubious
names like Kent Ambidextrous? (I actually got an email with
this name in the From line recently.) Very annoying, right?
The "good" news is that much of the spam sent through
Web contact forms is automatically produced by spam-generating "robots," which
can often be thwarted by adding a simple feature to your
form.
You know when you fill out a form online and are made to
copy a bunch of random letters or numbers into a text field
before hitting Submit? Ever wonder why you're doing that?
This handy tool is called a CAPTCHA,
and is a technique used to tell human form-fillers
apart from computerized entries. The catchy acronym stands
for the lengthy doozy "Completely Automated Public Turing
test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." While it's
not a perfect solution – visually impaired people can't
get past many common CAPTCHAs, and the technique still doesn't
stop real-live humans (with nothing better to do, apparently)
from spamming your form – it's a start!
Scroll down this
page to see a CAPTCHA in action on one
of my clients' sites. Try to submit the form without filling
out the CAPTCHA "verification image" field and
see what happens. (But please don't actually complete and
submit the form unless you really do want to contact Get
Unstuck and Get Going!)
Does adding a CAPTCHA to your contact form sound like something
that might make your life more spam-free?
Drop me a line and I'd be pleased to provide an estimate.
Got a technology term you'd like
demystified in ZooNews?
Send it to questions@zoonini.com.
Box of Crayons' Eight
Irresistible Principles of Fun Flash
movie now has its very own store – check out everything
from inspirational notecards, to a CD copy of the Eight Principles
movie, to the original card set that started it all.
We've integrated a mini content-management system (CMS)
with arctic-fishing tour operator Tukto
Lodge's Web site
to make it simple for the
client to add news and updates herself through a Web browser.
Short news blurbs display right on the homepage with longer
items continuing on an interior page, making it easy and
quick for return visitors to see what's new. Archives and
user comments complete the package.
It's the end of an era. At the end of November, TV
Guide Canada will cease publishing the print version of its long-running
magazine... which will be reborn as a solely Web-based publication! "Going
with a web-only product is a fitting format for the time-sensitive
and frequently changing nature of the content this publication
provides," TV Guide's publisher said. In other words,
moving to the Web will allow TV Guide to keep its listings
more up-to-date and better serve its readers.
The
company plans to earn revenue through advertising and by
providing other sites with content. In making the change
of media, TV Guide will save what it would normally spend
on paper (typically 30% of total operating costs), printing
(15%) and postage (10%). (Stats source: Jam
Showbiz)
TV Guide Canada joins Teen People among the latest print mags
to devote their resources solely to the Web.
And the Web marches on...
À la prochaine,
kp
aka Kathryn Presner |
