Ozdachs | Dangerous Common Sense

About Ozdachs

San Francisco Internet Marketer and web designer gets you on the Internet in a cost-effective, responsible way.

It's Not Stealing If They're Your Friends?

So, you find a really neat article on a topic that relates to your business and you want to share the find with your clients and visitors to your website.

Here’s a scenario I run into frequently with clients.

You’re not a thief, so you make sure that you give credit in the re-posting to the original author. You even link to the author’s page. You mark up the article a bit to emphasize what’s important to your clients, but the entire article — byline and all — is still there. You send the article to me to post to your website with some nice graphic.

I ask if you have permission from the author to copy their work.

You say that you’re acknowledging their authorship and that you’re just spreading their expertise and helping their reputation.

I ask if you have permission from the author to copy their work.

You ask if I can’t just put up the page. You’re sure no one will mind.

I ask you to confirm that you’re ready to indemnify me and to defend me at your cost for any copyright claims by third parties.

Let me confess that I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on television. However, I understand something about intellectual property rights and respect the right of creators to be able to determine where their work is shown.

By default, creative works, including Internet postings, are copyrighted by their creators and no one can use them without permission. The author or artist doesn’t have to do anything special to have copyright rights.

Permission to use someone’s work may be very easy to get. I have been emailed at least a couple of times by people wanting to copy an image on my personal website. The emails explained what the photos would used for and also told me that there would be a credit line but no money. I readily agreed to each request, flattered that someone liked my photography. I think my reaction is a typical one.

In the case of web article or blog entries a lot of authors would love to be considered an expert whose opinion is worth repeating. Re-posting their work with a link back to their website offers them exposure and a chance to sell their services.

Permission to copy is also sometimes granted on the website. Instead of saying nothing or “All Rights Reserved”, a copyright holder may choose to use a Creative Commons or other model copyright statement that specifies that people can re-use their work in some — or all — situations.

Copying from your friends (even those friends you’ve never met in person) expands the store of knowledge you can share with your clients. You look good for sharing valuable information. At the same time, the original author gains stature and potential clients for their own business.

Just make sure you say “Please” and get permission before you do the copying!

By Ozdachs|2009-09-25T14:31:31-07:00September 25th, 2009|Professional Services, Web Design|1 Comment

Get More Newsletter Readers: Answer the Spam Challenge

More and more people are trying to cut down on the spam that floods their in-boxes. Some Internet Service Providers like Earthlink and Web Hosting Services like Webmasters.com offer built-in spam challenging logic to their email accounts. Because I have several active email accounts I use Spamarrest to limit what gets passed along to my inbox.

These spam-limiting features all work by finding out who sent the email to you and then doing one of three things.

If the sender is someone you know of and approve, the message will be forwarded to your inbox.
If the sender is someone you know of and have blocked, the message is deleted.
If the sender is someone you don’t know, the sender is sent a request to verify that they are a human and not an automated spammer (see example at the right). If the sender responds to the challenge within 7 days, I get their original message and they are put on my list of approved correspondents. If the sender does not respond, their message is deleted in 7 days.

A huge majority of my email, over 95%, is in this third category. And, a huge majority of those messages are from automated spammers who never answer the spam challenge and whose messages are deleted in a week.

Occasionally I look through the hundreds of messages from unknown senders. Whenever I do, I usually see a newsletter or group mailing from someone I wouldn’t mind hearing from.

But, they didn’t answer the spam challenge.

This failure to respond is a wonky waste of time. Their business has spent hours of time — and therefore lots of money — preparing the mailing to me. But, after they mail their message, they don’t go through the replies to the newsletter to see that my automated service didn’t recognize the newsletter’s email address and wanted to verify that there were people behind the message.

All the newsletter writer would have to do would be to click on the link in the challenge email and then fill in a CAPTCHA or answer a question. They would only have to do it one time, because the the email address would be added to the approved list and future editions of their newsletter would be delivered automatically.

Worse, in my experience sending newsletters, a fair number of clients and prospects will reply to the newsletter itself with questions or even orders. If the sending business hasn’t assigned anyone to read the replies, then it is missing business in addition to readers.

It’s simple. If you send out an electronic newsletter, give someone in your organization the task of reading replies sent to the newsletter address. Have them answer the spam challenges. Tell them to answer the messages placing new orders, too!

By Ozdachs|2009-09-22T07:01:57-07:00September 22nd, 2009|Marketing|0 Comments

The #1 Mistake Other Newsletter Writers Make

Want to improve customer involvement with your electronic newsletter? You will get more attention for your message by simply avoiding the Number 1 common mistake made by other newsletter authors.

Their error? The newsletter writer starts writing about the company instead of focusing on the readers’ needs.

Have you read these headlines recently? All About Us

“Visit our New Website!”
“We’re featured in Modern Troll Magazine“.
“We’ve just received our state certification in Troll Tossing!”
“We’re working the weekend to be ready for Monday’s Sale”

I’ve read all of these happy notices just during the past week. We’ll maybe the names and certifications have been changed a bit, but the meanings are unaltered from what has appeared in my inbox.

Each of these messages talk about what the business has done, or is going through, to improve its service to the clients. Sounds pretty good, eh?

Actually not. All of those statements are about the business and not about the life of the client or prospect. The announcements brag about the business, but don’t make a direct tie to solving a problem that the reader has.

And most of the statements can be re-focused to convey the same information with a different focus:

“Visit our New Website!” becomes “Now schedule your appointment, check your account balance, and send a message to your doctor online on our updated website.”

“We’re featured in Modern Troll Magazine” becomes “Learn how to toilet train your trolls in 5 minutes in the article we wrote in Modern Toll Magazine“.

… you get the idea!

The world of informal, first-person blogs and individual podcasts makes it difficult to obey the marketing imperative to focusing on your clients. After all, aren’t blogs designed to share your personality and uniqueness with your clients? Well, maybe some of your readers love hearing about your personal travails, but all of them want you to help them with their problems.

More clients and prospects will read your newsletter and marketing materials when your words help them solve one of their problems. Most readers may like you, but in their selfish minds, your hard work is important only for how it will help them!

This slip of focus toward the life of the writer is difficult to avoid. Especially when you get folksy email responses to your business newsletter mailings. This slip of focus is one that I fall victim to myself – not that you, the reader cares!

The focus slip is natural, and it’s not an error that is likely to tick off your clients. Rather it’s an error that makes it less likely that your hard-written newsletter is going to have the marketing and sales impact you want.

So, remember. Sorry, it’s not about you! It’s about the reader and their problems.

By Ozdachs|2009-09-21T13:35:27-07:00September 21st, 2009|Marketing|0 Comments

Professional Resume Writer Gets a Mini-Site

This morning we published the first edition of a resume writing service’s site. Jerome has been a professional in staffing for over 10 years and started his business to help people get jobs in this troubled economy (or, to be ready for the coming boom in re-employment).

Congratulations, Jerome!

If you’re resume is looking tired or if you’re ready to spend some time with a job coach, see what Jerome can do for you!

By Ozdachs|2009-09-15T09:59:29-07:00September 15th, 2009|Sample Clients, Web Design|0 Comments

Postcards from the Edge

I am currently working on two web sites which were originally created by graphic designers. They are very pretty. Pretty enough to be postcards. But, they also are inflexible and difficult to work with. To me, they are postcards from the edge of web design purgatory.

If you’re about to hire a web designer, make sure that they are not proposing to take a postcard-perfect graphic and make it the template for your new site design without agreeing that the site will be flexible and will comply with industry standards.

The postcard web page designs I am working with were originally created in Photoshop or GoLive. Unfortunately, taking the great look from a design package like Photoshop and making it into an HTML/XHMTL web page is not something that these programs do well. Even though the software brags about its ability to output an HTML page from the graphics, it does it poorly.

These programs make their pages with tables and slices of images to construct the backgrounds and borders for the web page. Although the pages they produce claim to be standards compliant, they are not. For example, one design I am editing specifies that it is compliant with the XTML 1 Transitional standard, but it uses a non-compliant “height” attribute on table cells to achieve the spacing between its various page components.

Yeah, that’s pretty technical and the value of valid XHTML code is a subject for another post. But, here’s something that I can show visually.

These postcard web pages were designed to be a specific height. The graphic designers each dislike scrolling down web pages so they oriented them horizontally and limited the space on each page for text. If there is more text or graphics on the page than initially conceived by the designer, the page falls apart.

Here’s how one of the pages looks when only a small amount of text is typed on the page. It looks great:

But here is how that same page looks when “too much” text is added to the page, “too much” being more than fits in the fixed-size gray block:

Rather than making a template ready for expanding text, this box design disintegrates apart when additional lines of information is added to the page.

Web pages must be able to expand downward. You cannot guarantee that all the information on a topic will fit into a set number of words. In fact, top-ranking pages in Google generally have over 400 words on it, and that much information won’t fit on most postcards.

In addition, you can see that the photograph of the adorable boy is created in three slices. This means if the site owner wants to create new pages using a different photograph or change this photograph, a web designer would have to slice the new photograph into three slices of the exact same size. That’s at least three times as much work and it’s also a mess to track.

The situation was very limiting for the site owner who contacted me. He couldn’t add more pages or information to his website, and he wanted to tell web visitors about his expanding business.

He liked the colors and looks of the site created by the graphic designer, but he wanted his web site to attract and inform potential clients.

I was able to re-create the look of the page while using standards-compliant XTHML code. The column with the picture no longer breaks apart if the text on the right side shrinks or grows. New pages with new photos can be added easily.

As I write this, the new design is just live and the site owner and I am considering what information we want to add first. He has sample cost and cost-recovery spreadsheets to share, photos of his installation and equipment options, more information on options for residents and businesses. Look at this San Francisco solar power installation site, and see how the one-static postcard design now will support growth.

Graphic designers can create excellent looking web designs. If you engage a graphics person, I recommend one of two options. First, ask your graphics designer to agree to creating an expandable, XHTML, css standard-compliant site. If they don’t understand your request or say that they don’t be bothered with standards, ask that they create just the design. Then take the layout to a web designer for a XHTML, Cascading Style Sheet (css) web template.

The prettiest postcard sites will disappoint you if they don’t attract new clients and tell people about your business. Don’t be afraid to be as opinionated about the web site’s functionality as you are about its visual appearance!

By Ozdachs|2009-09-13T07:21:34-07:00September 13th, 2009|Search Engine Optimization, Web Design|1 Comment

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