Topics, Trends and Techniques from Brooks Bell Interactive
Month: November, 2009
Making long form email newsletters work: When a lot of information is a good thing
For a collective of talented artists like buyolympia.com, it’s easy to keep the interest of their current customers. The site houses everything from books to hand-screened shirts to hand-made wallets. The diversity of offerings, though, could be a potential issue when they send out their monthly e-newsletter. Thankfully, they do it with style and smarts.
Loyal customers are an easy target.
Whether a customer latches on to one specific artist or follows many, the interest in buyolympia.com’s products doesn’t usually wane. This works to the company’s advantage in a lot of ways. Having a loyal base of customers gives you more freedom for using heavy images and featuring lots of products. Most likely, they are accustomed to receiving this email, and therefore have turned on the images. Additionally, they are familiar with the diverse inventory, and expect to see a large range of products highlighted.
Keep the content fresh.
What I like about these emails is that I’m seeing something new every time. Read the rest of this post »
SEO and Analytics Friendly Flash
Here’s a little exercise for you to try sometime.
Go to your search engine of choice and do a look up for “Top Reasons Not to Use Flash.” You’ll see plenty of results, but it is mostly the same 2 or 3 lists repeated and regurgitated over and over again from blog to blog.
Half of the concerns are typically not related to Flash the tool, but to poor design or programming skills or just laziness on the part of the designers and developers not adhering to best practices. Another common concern is usability, a very serious issue that needs to be carefully considered based on your target audience. Part of this can be handled with proper design and programming; the rest is the nature of what Flash is: an interactive multi-media tool, not static text.
But these are topics for another discussion. For this post, I want to focus on four other items of contention always mentioned in relation to Flash:
- Search Engines do not like Flash
- Non specific page URLs or bookmarking
- Disabled Back Button
- Collection of analytical data
That is still a pretty serious list of issues, and the vast majority of Flash sites out there suffer from these drawbacks, but it doesn’t have to be that way!
The Perils of Text-Only Emails: Why Gap.com's Email Went Right into the Trash
I received an email in my inbox yesterday that surprised me. It was from Gap.com advertising an “Extra 25% Off for a Limited Time Only”.
I have been on Gap.com’s mailing list for quite some time (as well as the lists from Banana Republic and Old Navy) and while I rarely purchase from them, I often open them to see how they have designed their emails, how they showcase their products, and how they promote their offers.
The emails from Gap.com tend to be clean. Concise. Branded. They tend to have a strong visual cohesion to Gap.com. They also do a great job of evoking the same emotional pull that their TV advertising does.
Not this time.
This time, I was lured by a decent subject line, clicked to pen and was met with this: A text-only email with a lot of links. Read the rest of this post »
Interactive Design – The Long View (Part 1)
With the advent of new input devices like multi-touch technology, interactive designers are going to have to start looking beyond designing point-and-click interfaces. To do this, we will need a broader perspective when approaching interactive design.
This will be a two-part blog post. Part 1 will explore the limits of interactive design.
What is interactive design?
Interactive Design may seem like a modern invention. I mean, computers have only been around for 60 years or so and graphical user interfaces (GUI’s) for only about 30 years. But when you think about it, humans have been interacting with machines for centuries. Even the simplest of machines, the lever, requires some amount of interactive design.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009 AT 9:00 am
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What's so special about Flash?
It’s no secret that clients want to get the most bang for their buck, and banners with animation are a great way to grab attention. However, when it comes down to the two options we offer – animated .gif or Flash – things become a little complicated. What’s the difference between the two file types? Which one is better? Why the price difference?
