Web Worker Daily

For one of my new projects, I had to sign up for GetResponse, an email marketing service. Since I had to get a subscription anyway, I wondered if there was a way I could use the app to improve my freelance practice. Email newsletters are often used for product promotion, so why not use it to  market my services?

While it might seem to be too late for me to hop on the email marketing bandwagon, I see very few options that offer the same effectiveness for reaching my customers, particularly with my client base. Many of my clients aren’t tech savvy, which means they don’t have social-networking accounts, so I can’t contact them using Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Also, I doubt that many of them return to my web site after we’ve started working together.

In order to maximize the effectiveness of my email marketing campaign, I had to plan what kind of messages I would send to my customers. Here’s what I came up with: Read the rest of this entry »

This isn’t so much a full web app review as it is an announcement to heighten people’s awareness of a big no-no in web work. It’s not as much of a problem as it used to be, since I think people are getting better at avoiding this particular pitfall, but nothing annoys me (and clients) more than visiting a site and finding nothing but an “Under Construction” or “The site is currently being redesigned” page. In all likelihood, unless the page being visited is for a hotly anticipated new product from a major company, your visitor will never come back.

There’s one sure way to stay out of trouble, and that’s to wait to launch your web site until you actually have some content in a presentable form to show people. If, for whatever reason, you can’t wait that long (maybe your client wants to build the sort of anticipation normally reserved for companies like Capcom and Apple, for instance), then your placeholder should be functional rather than static. That’s where LaunchSplash comes in. Read the rest of this entry »