Welcome to the internet home of web designer, developer, pilot person and Cumbria dweller Dave Sparks.
They’re becoming ever more popular as a form of cheap, affordable and effective marketing but HTML emails can still be a pain in the arse mainly due to the dated rendering by most email clients. They’re something I’ve found myself doing ever more frequently recently (even getting an inclusion on the Beautiful Email Newsletters Gallery) so here’s my 10 basic tips for putting together your own HTML email newsletters. Continue reading
Well a nice little jolly down to London for the eCommerce Expo at Earls Court today. Generally I was surprised that I didn’t learn much new, except maybe that UK Fast have a recruitment policy that involves women who look good in hot pants http://twitpic.com/m8t5w (the girls in the picture are actually UK Fast employees and not hired in like I thought).
Not learning much can I guess be a good thing as it generally means we’re doing everything right in work. Still I attended a Google University session on analytics and I would certainly recommend Google University sessions if you get the chance to attend one. Amongst the things I took away were what the speaker said were his 5 key metrics that you should know for any eCommerce site and they’re equally applicable to normal sites. Continue reading
There’s a great deal of people who dislike IE6 and I’m amongst them, it’s an absolute pain in the arse to fix for and I agree that it should be done away with but I’m here to appeal to your sensible side. We need to be reasonable about it and I think it would be a different story if it were an Apple browser that was dragging it’s heels (I know, I know if it were an Apple browser it wouldn’t have sucked in the first place).
But why am I bothering to write about it when everyone else already has? Well it’s the attitude that some people seem to present to the problem and more so when I’ve seen people apply blanket bans on IE6 users on client sites. Continue reading
When I get the Flickr plugin installed I’ll be able to put a photo stream on but I wanted to point you all in the direction of a group I’ve just set up called Smiling Appliance.
It’s a group for images of things that look like things, mainly faces, so if you have any go and add them to the group. I’ve gotten it started with a few I’ve found already like the fellow on the right who lives down the road from my flat.
![I [heart] Trading Eye](http://www.kamikazemusic.com/wp-content/uploads/blog_tradingeye.jpg "I [heart] Trading Eye")
Firstly before I start I’d just like to say I think Trading Eye is a great piece of software and I think the guys at Dpivision have done a great job with it. Still there are some shortcomings and one of my major issues is with the search which I believe would be fixed with version 6 but from first look hasn’t.
Firstly if you search with an apostrophe there’s a good chance of breaking the search e.g. searching for (dave’s book). Secondly if you want a red book and searched with the phrase “red book” you wouldn’t get a match unless the exact phrase “red book” in that order was somewhere in the product title or description, even if the phrase “book red” was there that wouldn’t show up either.
So here’s my fix which currently works for version 5 and in the near future after I’ve had a poke around version 6 I hope to give you some adjustments for that.
Continue reading