Here’s an image showing the system in action:

Please feel free to contact me (jon@moongrabber.com) if you run into any problems, or you have any other feedback about the new look of the site. Thanks!

Plain text emails can look good too!

Recently I’ve been spending quite a bit of time designing and building HTML email templates, but the plain text version of the email always seems to be an afterthought (or ignored/forgotten about entirely). Don’t forget about your plain text email the next time you’re building an HTML email campaign.

Why spend time and resources on a plain text version of your email? MailChimp has a great article covering some of the most vital reasons for a plain text version, including:

• Some people prefer text emails, in fact they may even block or disable HTML emails from displaying.
• Email spam filters have gotten much more aggressive over the years, and many filters scan both the HTML and plain text content for possible triggers (not having a plain text version at all could be an even bigger spam flag).
• Many email applications are still severely out-dated and lacking in support for even basic HTML rendering. Some of these applications even default to the plain text email if an HTML issue occurs (especially on mobile devices).

So what can you do to spruce up your plain text email template? Check out Campaign Monitor’s Designing for the Inbox articles, especially Chapter 2: Designing Plain Text Email.

For those of you not aware, there have been an increasing number of sites reporting security breaches, resulting in the leak of user and password data. LinkedIn, eHarmony and now last.fm are all a part of the latest wave of compromised data (as noted by The Verge).

These 3 sites aren’t alone. Sony, Zappos, Microsoft, Twitter and many other major brands have reported their own security breaches and compromised data.

So, if you have an active account with any of the affected sites I highly recommend changing your password. I also recommend creating separate passwords for your vital accounts and information online, especially your email and financial accounts, which can be used as gateways to gain access to other accounts and personal information. Microsoft also has a brief, but good article on strong passwords (and a good tool for checking password strength).

UPDATE: FormSpring has just announced today (7/10/12) that their site has suffered a similar security breach, and that they will be disabling some 30 million affected user accounts.

The BBC was quick to correct the issue for later broadcasts, but the blooper can still be seen on the web, thanks to YouTube

Tom Maslen has put together an interesting post that details some of the process behind the re-design, and the challenges that had to be overcome. For those that want more be sure to check out the Responsive News site, which is where the BBC  team posts about their latest developments (http://blog.responsivenews.co.uk/).

Like it’s friendly cousin Panda, we know that this new update will target websites violating Google’s quality guidelines, and decrease their search rankings accordingly. Web Pro News has a great collection of new posts concerning the Penguin update already, and also details Google’s basic quality guidelines and unwritten rules.

Google’s Developer Programs Tech Lead Maile Ohye has also been busy producing a number of short segments covering a variety of Search Engine Optimization Do’s and Don’ts (such as Pagination and SEO and 5 Common Mistakes in SEO).

 UPDATE: 06/25/12 – The Google Webmaster Team has also conveniently released a new video playlist on youtube labeled “Webmaster Academy”; aimed at helping webmasters to get their websites performing better in search results.