Understandably people want to extend their visual brand throughout their communication platforms – including email. But as anyone who has delved into designing for email knows, getting creative in email can be a challenge.

Often efforts at email creativity results in unintended layouts, different results across email programs, and broken images. So when you’re trying to present a consistent brand by using an email signature, how do you avoid these pitfalls? By keeping it simple. (more…)

You’ve assembled a great team to build your new website: Congrats – that’s huge! Besides providing content & monitoring their progress, what should you be doing to help the site succeed? (more…)

Like with many things besides the pie vs cake debate (pie is clearly better!), there is no clear answer to the blog vs email marketing debate. There is also room for both – have your cake and eat your pie too! Lorrie (of Web Marketing Therapy) and Kate virtually sat down to create some guidelines for to help get you started.

Before we get into it, though, let’s break down what form they take most often:

A Blog: A blog is part of a website or a stand-alone destination in which content is published over time. It becomes a valuable repository (hopefully) of information and links.  Also, people can visit to read/view/listen to your posted content and interact with the author(s) by leaving comments at any time. People can use an RSS feed to subscribe to your blog, which delivers the latest content from your blog to their Feed Reader or their email inbox. You need a platform on which to create your blog, like Blogger or WordPress (my favorite).

Email Marketing: Email Marketing is a subscription-based service in which you send content (eg: a newsletter) via email to a subscription list. What you send can include text, links and images, but needs to adhere to some of the limitations of the email programs that will display them. Often, an incentive is offered to entice people to sign up for your mailing list. You need a service that allows you to create a way for people to sign up, manage the subscription list, and send emails to them.

So how do you know which to use when?

Read on…