Posts Tagged ‘content’

Email Design

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Everyone knows how important email is. You probably check yours several times a day for new updates.

Let’s take a look at something I just got:

*Please do not reply to this message*
————————————————————
You asked that we send you a summary of Meetup message board
activity. The following is a list of discussions with new
messages posted since July 14, 2010 12:17 PM.
————————————————————

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SECRET HANDSHAKE – THE WINNIPEG CREATIVE SOCIETY
Forum: The Winnipeg Creative Freelance Society Discussion Forum
============================================================

90 second quickie at portage and main
http://www.meetup.com/secrethandshake/boards/view/viewthread?thread=9571812
Latest message by Paul Clerkin on August 13, 2010 at 11:01 AM

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Add info@meetup.com to your address book to receive all Meetup
emails

To manage your email settings, go to:
http://www.meetup.com/account/comm/
Meetup, PO Box 4668 #37895 New York, New York 10163-4668

Meetup HQ in NYC is hiring!
http://www.meetup.com/jobs/

If you’re in Winnipeg, I encourage you to come to our monthly meetup. It’s a great little gathering of local creative/tech people.

Now, I signed up for email notifications because I’m just not going to check the site (which I never visit) every time I want to know if something new has been posted. In fact, the less I have to visit the site, the better.

When I sign up for email alerts on a forum or message board, I want to see something like this:

New discussion messages since July 14:

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SECRET HANDSHAKE – THE WINNIPEG CREATIVE SOCIETY
Forum: The Winnipeg Creative Freelance Society Discussion Forum

90 second quickie at portage and main
Paul Clerkin on August 13, 2010 at 11:01 AM:
The Winnipeg Film Group is proud to announce an open call to our second annual 90 SECOND QUICKIE film contest. The 90 Second Quickie was created in 2009 by the Winnipeg Film Group to encourage the creation of new, micro films. Blown away by the shorts in our first year we are doing it again – this time bigger, brighter and bolder!

To visit the thread, visit http://www.meetup.com/secrethandshake/boards/view/viewthread?thread=9571812

—

To manage your email settings, go to:
http://www.meetup.com/account/comm/
Meetup, PO Box 4668 #37895 New York, New York 10163-4668

Even that could be shuffled around a bit, but there are some good practices:

  • Keep cruft to a minimum
  • Display the main information as soon as possible
  • Give links to things
  • Also provide fall-backs for plain-text email clients
  • Give them (at least some of) the content from the site, so they don’t have to click and load additional pages

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On Curation

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

As website owners and content creators, we have a duty toward the users of our content. When we blog about something, the information we throw to the world could very well become dated and wrong.

What Can We Do?

When you write about a modern topic, that post is almost guaranteed to become stale and useless, if it sits the way it is. As such, there are a few things you might do:

  • Keep a clear separation between posts you’re willing to curate, and those that are simply snapshots of life (real blog posts)
  • Set a kill-time for each (curated) post when you create it; after which it is no longer viewable by the public, and becomes hidden until you can revisit it and freshen it up
  • Allow errata to be submitted to curated pieces, so that readers can help you improve the article
  • Keep a list of the curated pieces, possibly by listing links to those pieces on a separate page

I’m thinking of doing the above with this blog. Some of the posts I’ve written won’t be useful in the near future, and others should be upkept so they always provide correct information. Perhaps I’ll implement these steps in the next iteration of my design.

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