In celebration of PacMan’s 30^th anniversary, Google decided to do a PacMan doodle that was interactive as well as playable. The “I’m Feeling Lucky” button was replaced with an “Insert Coin” button, and if you pressed it twice, you can have Ms. PacMan join in the game. This was a first for Google, and by looking at the source code, the game was not developed  in an interactive application platform such as Adobe’s Flash, but rather using straightforward CSS, Javascript and clever HTML coding.  Flash does play a role in  producing the sound for the game, which also makes it the first time ever that Flash has been on the Google Homepage.

Check it out while you can, it will disappear by tomorrow. Happy Gaming!

In this first of a multi part series, we’ll look at how to create the ideal website, that both effectively communicates your message and is easy to navigate. The navigation system should be one of the most well thought out components of your site. It is important, that key elements, such as services and contact information are listed within the navigation menu.

Let’s say we have a company named Bicycle Courier Services (BCS) that specializes in local delivery of small packages. So an ideal simplified website navigation menu for Bicycle Courier Services, that should be common throughout all pages, would be: About BCS, Our Services, Contact Us, Home. About BCS, would list all the information about the company, any mission statements, or associations that the company is part of. The Services section would list all the services in detail that BCS provides. The Contact Us link would list basic contact information, such as telephone numbers, e-mails, faxes, etc. And last but not least, the Home section would link back to the BCS homepage. Sounds pretty simple, but you would be surprised in the amount of sites that don’t follow this format, making themselves more difficult to navigate. If you follow this simplified navigation format, the most important parts of the site are easily seen and recognized by the visitor. You can obviously add additional sections to the menu, such as a Downloads area (to access Bill of Lading’s, Credit Application Forms, etc) in the future if required, but make sure to keep it simple and clear.

It wouldn’t make any sense for example to have the Contact Us link located somewhere at the bottom of the page, or in an obscure location, which believe it or not, some company websites still do. Make sure important links such as these are in a prominent and well seen location, unless that is, you don’t want people to contact you.

Lately, we’ve converted several of our clients’ print advertisements into HTML e-mails. It’s an effective and relatively inexpensive way (if you have a set of existing ads) of utilizing a widely used communications medium in order to promote your brand or service. A major advantage of an HTML e-mail is that it’s much faster, efficient and visually appealing in delivering your message when compared to traditional e-mail methods.

As an example, let’s say that we have a service announcement to make to our existing client base. With traditional e-mail, we can do this in one of several ways.

One method would be to actually write about the service announcement in the body of the e-mail, which makes it a relatively simple, but an uninspiring way of communicating your message. It’s hard to capture a reader’s attention with a simple text message, and if this message consists of several paragraphs of copy it becomes even less effective.

The other method would be to write up the announcement, and send it out as an attachment to the e-mail. While people e-mail millions of attachments every day, because of security concerns, some recipients may be weary of opening attachments especially when they come from people that they’ve had limited contact with. Some IT departments go so far as actually stripping the attachment from the e-mail before it arrives at its intended destination. Recipients may also not have the correct application installed in order to open the e-mail.

With an HTML e-mail, you can effectively tackle all the shortcomings of delivering your message via regular e-mail. By embedding your advertisement as an image, or a mini HTML web page, you instantly deliver a visually rich message, that the recipient can see instantly, and doesn’t have to do any additional clicking, or open up any other applications, in order to view your message. As a bonus, you can also track the amount of times your e-mail has been viewed by the recipient using your servers statistics software, or via Google Analytics integration, because all of the images that are within the e-mail are hosted on your server.

Now, unless you have a lot of experience in the design and implementation of HTML e-mails, it’s best if you start off with an existing pre-designed template. If you’re going to wing it on your own, SitePoint’s guide of How to Code HTML e-mail newsletters is a good place to start. If you don’t have time to do any of these two options, contact us to see how we can help with your HTML eMarketing campaign.