Published on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 by Matthew Alberty
Join Adcetera and other local, tech-savvy Houstonites at NetSquared to hear from Brooke McMillan of Livestrong (www.livestrong.org). Brooke will be speaking about Online Communities with the Lance Armstrong Foundation.
I’m sure you know who Lance Armstrong is and I’m sure you’ve seen or even had one of those yellow wrist bands with Livestrong on it. Come hear how Livestrong is building Online Communities and how you can help.
What
Brooke McMillan of Livestrong
When
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 7:00 PM
Where
Stag’s Head Pub
2128 Portsmouth St.
Houston TX 77098
(713) 533-1199
Published on Monday, October 12th, 2009 by David Loop
Designing an e-mail seems like a relatively simple task at first — almost like creating a streamlined, one-page Web site. But before you start working on that masterpiece, there are a few things you should consider:
Coding like it’s 1999
The use of tables is an absolute must. Most e-mail clients, be they desktop or Web-based, will not support divs, floats or any sort of fancy positioning. So prepare to chop up those graphics and get ready for lots of table cell excitement.
All element styling must be inline. Just about every e-mail client around will ignore anything between “head” and “/head”. Try to stick to basic styling as well.
Forget about using background images; they’re more trouble than they’re worth. Placing a fancy calendar background neatly under some html text would take some pretty slick ingenuity.
Do not assume images will always work. Most e-mail clients come with images turned off by default, requiring your audience to manually restore them. Always include alt and title attributes.
Thin is in. Keep screen resolutions, window resizing, and e-mail client window panes and columns in mind, and watch that width. Remember, you’re not designing for a Web browser.
We’ve developed more than our fair share of e-mail campaigns at Adcetera. Here are a few tips that will help you create the perfect e-mail:
By far the most difficult e-mail software we’ve worked with is Microsoft Outlook 2007. Using the CSS property “border-collapse” can be extremely handy when working with tables. We also noticed that using left and right borders in tables causes some unsightly results. Our solution was to create extra cells with a background color for outside borders.
Testing is your greatest ally. Services such as Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp provide the means for testing across multiple e-mail clients.
Always test with the default settings and preferences within your e-mail clients. Assume the majority of your audience will use their software straight out of the box.
In some e-mail clients, inline styling was ineffective within the “table” element. Styling a table’s “tr” and “td” child elements gave the best results.
Helpful resources:
Testing, tips and articles: www.campaignmonitor.com
Testing, tips and articles: www.mailchimp.com
Use and support of Web standards in e-mail: www.email-standards.org
Converting external CSS to inline CSS: premailer.dialect.ca
Published on Monday, October 5th, 2009 by Julai Whipple
It’s time again for Halloween, AKA “Weirdo Christmas.” It’s the time when the freaks crawl out of the woodwork, and the woodwork is chock-full of freaks, take it from me. Some people spend all year planning the perfect costume, collecting bits and pieces from here and there, gleefully staying up late into the night sewing thousands of seed pearls onto their zombie mermaid costume or constructing a scale model of a Victorian chimney out of cereal boxes for their chimneysweep outfit. Some spend hours figuring out how to carve Christopher Walken’s face onto a jack-o-lantern (Chris-o-lantern?) Other people are not so enthused. Some spend the months leading up to October 31 in a haze of worry, nervousness, and irritability—all symptoms of Halloween Anxiety. And the only cure is a heady mixture of beer, candy, and kick-ass pumpkin design.
The beer you can purchase yourself (with proper ID, of course) at many local establishments. The candy is plentiful, as long as you can ring doorbells and convince the people inside that you’re collecting it for “a sick kid.” And for incredible pumpkin ideas, you need look no further than www.batcetera.com, Adcetera’s new Halloween-themed site. We’ve got tons of amazing pumpkin designs, created by some of the most twisted minds in advertising. You can also download some horrifyingly cute screamsavers and vote in this year’s pumpkin contest.
So you see, there’s really no reason to succumb to Halloween Anxiety. Just breathe deeply, plan ahead, and steal some of our ideas. After all, in the world of advertising, that’s a time-honored tradition!
www.batcetera.com
Published on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 by Matthew Alberty
Join Adcetera and other local, tech-savvy Houstonites at NetSquared to hear from Michael Coppens of Houston’s Society for Performing Arts (www.spahouston.org) come to speak with us on learning the ins and outs of the Houston arts community.
Learn about the enormous variety of Houston arts organizations, how they impact the cultural scene here in Houston and ways that you can connect and help these amazing groups.
What
Navigating the Houston arts community with Michael Coppens!
When
Tuesday, October 13, 2009 7:00 PM
Where
Stag’s Head Pub
2128 Portsmouth St.
Houston TX 77098
