It read :"People who write emails for a living. Stop expecting me to write back immediately. It might be your job, but it isn't mine'

That was it.

But it struck a chord with me. And here's why. Some people really do send email for a living. That might be trivialising the emails themselves a little, but the premise is essentially there. They spend their lives in front of computers reading, sending and replying to email. I'm sure we all know people who do just this.

But with designers, the opposite is true. They spend their time designing things, writing complex code, producing convoluted and complicated animations, and stringing together applications and systems that form websites and iPhone apps. And here's the thing. These things all require huge amounts of concentration, and huge amounts of time to complete. You can be sure that we are not dropping what we are doing the minute an email lands.

Much has bene written about the creative process; much that I agree with and just as that I don't. What is incontesetable is that it requires application to perfect, and further application to properly apply across the various media that we deal with nowadays. Similarly in a digital agency, developers spend hours going cross-eyed over pages of code that required uninterrupted application if their time is to be efficient and if mistakes are to avoided.

So don't for a second think that I am implying that a designers work is more important than someone in a clerical role for example. Just that the tasks a designer does are far less easily 'picked up again' after an interruption. And lets face it, that's exactly what emails and telephone calls are.

Thus it was that the tweet from @maxvoltar struck a chord. If I'm working on a project for client A, would they expect me to drop their work if client B mailed with a request for something urgent? Probably not, and yet the expectation we often get is that an immediate for of communication (email, text) should require an immediate response (what could they be doing instead of responding to me?)

Efficient agencies need to have reasonable expectations of their creatives. Hopefully they will have Account Handlers who act as a buffer for emails and calls, and only pass on requests to designers when it is appropriate to do so and with consideration for the work that is being handled. And vice versa. Designers need to be mindful of Account Handlers also and not waste their time in producing work that disappoints or fails to meet the brief, as this will only become a self-perpetuating cycle.

But it made me think whether we need to better educate as to what ecxpectations we put on ourselves as creatives, and what we lead our clients to expect of us. They pay the bills after all, but we need to make it clear when they can expect a response, and if you check mail periodically and dedicate time each day to respond, then do so during those times, and close your email afterwards.

A slow response is one thing, but bad work and missed deadlines is another altogether.

Search is hotting up this festive period. It’s official. Just when we thought Google had it sewn up with a 98% market share of search, it appears that it is all change in the church of search.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine which recently replaced Live Search has seen an uptake in adoption, in part due to its bundling with Internet Explorer 8, but also due to no small amount of advertising on their part. Google has launched an operating system in Chrome OS, a browser in Chrome, and you are as likely to be delivered a video search from YouTube as a webpage since its acquisition of the video-streaming giant.

Both search engines provide results in essentially the same way though. They both deliver pages of results which direct the user to cached pages on websites, news results, or possibly files such as video or PDF’s. This is all very good provided your query is ‘Restaurants in Reigate’ or ‘Design Agency + Leatherhead’ where you simply want to find the most relevant results for any given combination of words. But what if your search query was ‘Is there snow in Whistler today’ or ‘Is there traffic near Heathrow’ – searches where up-to-the minute results are crucial.

Enter good old Twitter. The micro-blogging service that encourages users to update their status in 140 characters or less. This data (XML) has been optioned by both Microsoft and Google and will shortly be included into their search results. Microsoft announced their tie-in with Twitter at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this year, and Bing has already started to highlight the most popular topics featured in ‘tweets’ in their results.

The benefits to this are clear to see, with search users having access right away to up-to-the minute information posted from users’ mobile devices throughout the day. Skiers will update the snow information daily from their iPhones which will automatically feed into search engine results, providing more accurate information than any snow report ever would. News results will be reported from people on the ground rather than by reporters who turn up after the event has passed. YouTube have even opened up a platform for the public to upload photos and video directly to news corporations who broadcast videos and photos on the nightly news. Most of the footage of the terrorist attacks in London in 2007 was eyewitness footage taken on camera phones, and media organizations are working hard to make it easier for this footage to be supplied to them from people on the ground. Immediacy is everything.

And so it is that Twitter begins to be taken seriously – no longer the preserve of the mindlessly self-involved, an active and meaningful Twitter presence is now a key technique in achieving good search results. Provide a regular and useful feed to your site and its resources, but vitally ensure you respond to events in the press in a timely manner. If BBC news runs a story on the worrying salt levels in school catering, tweet that your products are low in salt and well below guidelines and your update may well appear alongside that article in Google. Encourage sign-up to your Twitter feed to ensure people with accounts hear of your updates, and start thinking about your tweets ending up in search pages as opposed to just existing on twitter.com. Be mindful of search keywords in your tweets and stick to what you commit. Be regular, relevant and always try and link back to your site to ensure your brand is kept front of mind.

But then I have never been under any doubt that when you have a specialised field of knowledge, and spend your life talking to clients who don't share your knowledge (that is after all why they engage you) there will always be lots to discuss as each party shares their insights. I love to talk digital, and in turn I love to learn my clients business so we can better help them to market those services.

So it perhaps came as a shock when I suggested that a key part of generating leads on a website, was to ensure that a web editor writes regular content for a site, to encourage repeat traffic and built loyalty, and was met with cries of 'but what would we write about?' Well, your business? What you do. The knowledge you have amassed over years of trading, and the benefits of that to your client base.

You see, no matter how much you take for granted what you know, there is a benefit in writing it down. This by itself will help to distill that knowledge into a succinct snippet of advice. You may take it for granted but your public may not. And writing it down will help you to decide whether it is worth publishing or not. Think about the projects you have done, and the services you have offered and offer one piece of advice per service. The first lesson you can learn with marketing your services is that you can perform so much of it yourself provided you commit yourself to regular updates on your activities, regular communications to prospects and clients, and then regular refreshes of this material. I can think of almost no area of business where you couldn't find regular subjects to post on, provided you had an audience.

Focus your writing on key benefits to the user, rather than on how great you might at that activity. Focus on specific examples of successes, and on how your prospects should plan a campaign such as this for themselves, and provide tips on how to avoid common pitfalls. Providing this information now, will ensure you audience are kindly disposed towards you when they find themselves tendering for a supplier in the future.

So start now - start writing down your services. Start to write down examples of when you have used those services. And commit to writing just one article a month, inviting responses from your audience on a forum, blog, or just be email. You may be surprised how many people will request topics. The key to this is start to do something. Don't say how tedious your undertakers business can be and who would possibly want to know about advanced embalming, because there will be forums, newsgroups and meet-ups for people just like you, who are passionate about their job and keen to engage with like minded people.

So commit to writing content, and see just how easy it is to produce original content when you just put pen to paper for the first time.

E-Marketing – How to adopt a successful strategy

We all receive them. And if research is to be believed, we are all more than happy to subscribe to them. But how many of us know the right way to adopt an email marketing strategy for our own business. And vitally, how do we make it succeed? Well, it just might be easier than you think.

Recent research by Forrester in the US has thrown up some interesting facts regarding e-marketing in the B2B market. The two key findings from this show firstly that out of 878 B2B decision makers, when asked what media they use to help them do their job, 78% of them replied that electronic newsletters were the most useful. This being the top response. Couple this with the fact that decision makers are moving over to this form of marketing faster than marketers are adopting it as a strategy, and you can see how vital it is to be active in this area.

So how do you go about it?

1 – Firstly, and most importantly, source and partner with a reputable Email Service Provider (ESP). This is crucial, not least because they will provide you with a user friendly online portal for building and sending the campaigns, but also because they will guarantee your mails are received. Don’t try and send from your Outlook. Ever! It is estimated that between 85% and 95% of all mail worldwide is spam, so with the email industry geared up to block this, the challenge of getting legitimate mail through has never been greater. A reputable ESP will help you achieve this, and many of the key players (Dotmailer, NewsWeaver, Campaigner) regularly advertise in this magazine.

2 – Start to collect, cleanse and verify your email addresses. Request that your sales force or customer service teams ask for an up to date email address when speaking to clients. Encourage that all prospects are added to a separate list so that you can tailor your campaigns appropriately.

3 – Stay legal. Only use email addresses from people whose permission you have to mail them, and always provide an opt-out on any communication you subsequently make. Check the Direct Marketing Association Code of Practice first to familiarise yourself with the legalities regarding this, but don’t be tempted to deviate from it at any cost! Send an introductory mail to begin with, confirming that they are on your lists, explaining what they can expect to now receive and confirming your permission to send. Request they add you to their ‘safe list’ to ensure your next messages are not junked.

4 – Target your campaigns. You know your customers and how they differ. Separate your lists in terms of prospects, customers and lapsed customers and tailor your creative appropriately, and your content to address the unique sector challenges they face. Be sure to develop a design template that allows for quick and easy updates. You don’t want a total rebuild every time you mail.

5 – Keep on the ball. A huge benefit of e-marketing is the speed at which you can send a campaign in response to new industry regulations, or react to issues in the media. Be aware of these trends and demonstrate to your list that you are ahead of the game by sending a mail out on the day the news breaks.

6 – Invest in design. All of the above has little impact unless you invest some time and thought into the design of your mails. It should reflect your existing website or corporate identity so as to reassure your recipients that it is from you. Failure to do this will result in a marked drop in your open rates, as people are naturally wary of anything unfamiliar. A good ESP will provide design tools for you within their applications. If they don’t, commission a good design agency to provide templates for you.

7 – Keep it Simple. Be as engaging, daring, and bold as you see fit via the design of your mailer, but keep your message or call to action clear and simple to complete. Make sure your key message or call to action is the first things that is read, and avoid reams of text. It won’t get read.

8 – Be essential. Provide added-value with your e-marketing. A constant, relentless hard-sell, no matter how targeted or well designed will be seen as just another intrusion in an already busy in box. Mail out with some interesting industry facts, research or perhaps even a general message from the MD. Do this and you are much more likely to win the allegiance of your lists, keeping you front of mind should they require your services.

9- Test. Test. Test. There is nothing more irritating than receiving a newsletter that formats poorly, has missing images, or links that don’t work. Ensure your ESP provides you with an IN-BOX preview, allowing you at a glance to preview your mail in a variety of different email clients. Only when you have ironed out all bugs, and have read, re-read and read again, click SEND.

10 – Analyse! E-Marketing is hugely measurable. Most ESP’s offer reporting as part of their system and this is where you can monitor the success of your campaign. Choose an ESP that offers you reporting that meets your needs, and experiment with your mailings,  paying attention to the results. Vitally, speak to your list and ask them what they do and don’t like! Don’t let e-marketing take the place of any other communication.

The reason for this post is that I am constantly finding myself justifying the cost for web design work. Yes, anyone can 'build' a website. Yes, everyone's nephew / grandson / grandmother can build a 'website' We all know that, and thankfully we seem to have bested the opinion that any of these options are a sensible way to go. And when exactly wasthe contruction of a website ever represent the skill element involved? Anyone surely can put together a booklet, but you wouldn't trust them with your company's annual report? Anyway, I digress.

One of the key differences I see is the continual retraining that any developer, project manager and designer needs to put themselves through to remain a useful member of a team. Take for example Twitter or Digg. Nowadays it is common to request that code be put on a website to allow the user to either share your content with Twitter or post on Digg. That's a common enough request and we all know what that means - but what about the developer? We expect them to instantly be able to handle this request in a timely manner - in other words, in a time frame that a client would find cost effective. But that developer has had to notice that trend coming, spend his or her own time researching it, experimenting with it, all on the off chance that it would be asked of them. Add to that list countless other trends in development, that all need time spent reading, researching, experiementing, and in most cases this is all something that a developer would do in their own time. Few agencies I know allow for R+D time within normal working hours.

So there you have it. Worth thinking about I think.

There are formats developed I know - Ogg and Theora have been in existence for a while now, but they are far from being a practical format for either mass encoding via reliable programme plugins, or from being accepted as a format for playback by commonly used devices.

And there's the problem isn't it. Commonly used devices. Not niche players such as DIVX and VLC. Not even streaming websites such as YouTube or Vimeo.

No sir. Because the simple truth is, if you are like me and you work in an agency, servicing clients who are not technically minded (and why should they be, that's why they have an agency) then you need a video format to work with Windows Media Player. Quicktime at an absolute push. Because that's what people have pre-installed. That's what they use to play video attachments from email and they will consider anything that doesn't work in that format, either dangerous, or problematical. I can't bear people saying 'Why can't the client install Quicktime? Why can't they just download VLC?' Why? Probably beacuse they don't know how? Or maybe their IT department prohibit them from doing so? But either way, they shouldn't have to! But it should be easier for media professionals to encode to WMV. And it isn't. And here's why.

Because in this age of the partisan web, where JPEG and GIF can be written from almost any image editor. And where HTML, CSS and Javascript can be written from any text editor. Video is stil utterly controlled by the manufactuer of codecs such as Sorenson, Cinepak or Apple. And at the root of it all is the war between Microsoft and Apple, bubbling away nicely.

Now if you're a video professional, the chanes are you will use Final Cut. Final Cut won't write WMV (Windows Media Video) files, the favoured file for playback on Windows machines using WMP (Windows Media Player). Final Cut will write AVI's which WMP can use, but they have huge file sizes and simply aren't portable. So we need a plugin (which we must purchase) that will write WMV files from Final Cut, but that has inherent countless bugs as neither party shares source code, and breaks with every update (the current Snow Leopard OS has rendered Flip4Mac, the market leader codec for WMV on the Mac, hopelessly broken)

So we find ourselves in the situation where Apple can't write to WMV, and Windows Media Player won't playback Quicktime files, the native file format for exporting from Final Cut. A mexican stand off if you will, but one that polarises users and only causes massive irritation. Consider my experience recently when I had to export from Final Cut to AVI, from AVI into another programme to reduce the physical size, and then into yet another programme to encode to WMV, thus reducing the file size. And after spending some £1000.00 on video editing software and still not being able to write a usable file straight away, these things start to grate a little!

All content should be no more than 3 clicks away..

What is it with myths on the website and the number 3? 3 second rules. 3 clicks away?

Three kinds of nonsense.

Another of those handy expressions thrown up in a planning meeting when putting together a site map I think. This particular myth simply has no place in web design these days, not least because it does not correlate with the type of content currently online, nor the volume.

Much of the content on the web nowadays (technical information, technical support, ebay, mortgage applications) allows us to tailor results via information we input. This can clearly not take place within three clicks. The amount of choice on Amazon or on Dell’s site for example provide more options that can be explained away in three clicks. The average website with search requires two clicks often to find the page needed to complete any given task, let alone, anything else. Imagine the amount of navigation options we’d have to build into an e-commerce site to allow for any item to be found in three clicks from the homepage?!

So for this myth we revert to the sentiment of the myth, rather than the detail itself. Make it as easy as possible for your audience to find your content, and vitally, provide content they would wish to find.

All content on your pages should be ‘above the fold’

Disregard. Ignore. Rubbish.

Let’s be clear what we mean here. The ‘fold’ is the bottom of your browser window, when your browser is maximized to fit your screen. In web terms, it is the point at which you would begin to scroll vertically if content extended beyond it. Hence why it earned such (mythical) importance, as it was thought that any content that sat below the fold, would simply be ignored.

Again, this one is what we might call a ‘legacy’ item. It owes more to ignorance in terms of usability testing and the limited bandwidth than anything else.

Usability testing now informs us that our offline experiences better inform our online experiences than we thought. We don’t just read a newspaper headline and then ignore the rest of the front page. We don’t sit passively and accept the first selection of products an e-commerce store displays us. We know to interact and choose a view which suits us. Users prefer an e-commerce store to display all products that meet our criteria on one page only, creating a very long page. Newspaper websites and directory sites such as Wikipedia also produce long pages of content over and above needless ‘clicking around’ to avoid users losing interest. So it became clear that instead of users wanting a passive experience, quite the reverse was true. We wanted more interaction and less page refreshes.

Couple this with the vast difference in screen sizes and mobile enabled devices and you can see that the fold is going to appear in a different place for almost every user. On a 30” monitor set to 1660 x 1200 pixels, you would struggle to have a fold at all. On a laptop with 1024 x 768 pixels, it will cause most sites to scroll. With iPhones becoming more popular, all sites will scroll. So you can see that it is almost impossible to enact anyway.

Bandwidth, or more specifically, low bandwidth dial-up connections gave a more practical, ‘nuts and bolts’ reason for keeping content above the fold. Long pages, meant slower page load times, and therefore we were keen to only show content that could be seen right away and acted upon, rather than over delivering on content and losing audiences due to slow performance. With broadband now in most homes this simple isn’t a concern anymore.

One thing to take away from all of this hot air, is the importance of putting your critical content, your calls to action, above the fold. While we know that users are happy to scroll, and in most cases have to, it is clearly madness to put vital navigation or buttons way down the page. Explain your content and make your buttons and form elements the focus of your visible area, and let the content populate down the page.

Another one bites the dust.