| LED Digest 1896: A Client's Perspective of Design Conflicts |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ............................................... November 17, 2004 Issue #1896 ............................................... .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== <Moderator Comment> --== Schedule Comments ==-- ~ Paul ~ Roger ~ Paul ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Conflicts of Interest ==-- ~ Heather Davis ~ Michael Linehan ~ Michael Coley --== SMTP Servers & Altering the 'From' Field ==-- ~ Rick Gortatowsky ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Why Firefox? ==-- ~ Johnn Four ~ Charles Oertel ~ Veronica Yuill ======== NEW ==================================== <Moderator Comment> Greetings LEDer, I've got a Special Issue coming to you on our "Conflicts of Interest" thread -- lots of posts and not enough room! Look for it on Friday. Also, here are a few more comments regarding our new schedule. I'll publish the rest of them tomorrow. Best wishes, Adam ------------------------- From: Paul I'd like to make these remarks: 1) lately, I have not been able to participate as fully as I would like (hoping to change that) so I often play 'catch up', reading 3 or 4 past issues at one time. 2) I get the feeling that the reduced schedule has caused a reduction in posts by default. 3) I fear that continued minimization may lead to attrition and possibly the demise of one of the all-time great email lists (I've been around since issue 400-something and I'm really attatched (blush)). Perhaps others have some rational comments or suggestions to make!? Perhaps this might be a (short-term) discussion topic. I might suggest a 4-day compromise -- or 3 days with EXTRA! editions if a hot topic pops up. Paul ------- next comment ------- From: Roger Hello Adam, First off, let me say a big, hearty and heartfelt Thank You for producing this fine newsletter. I believe I get a lot of good out of it and hope to continue that in the future. I'm just now beginning in the world of Internet Commerce and often look to back issues of the LED for advice and some items (both good and bad) to watch out for. Speaking of the future, on to the scheduling question. Either schedule is fine with me, although I find I am better able to digest what has been said with the Tuesday - Thursday schedule. I realize that may not jibe with those that completely make their living from the 'net, but that's my opinion and I'm sticking with it (for now). Thanks again, Roger ------- next comment ------- From: Paul Leave it as is. I think that the posts are more relevant when on a 3 day per week schedule rather than trying to fill a 5 day schedule. Paul ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Heather Davis Subject: Conflicts of interest > [My client's] opposition... saw [their website, which I developed] > and immediately contacted me about designing them a website. > Today my original client rang to say... that he felt I was in a very > bad "conflict of interest" position. - Mark Medlicott, LED 1893 Hello All, Just thought the group may find comments from a perspective of a client interesting. This issue came up years ago when we first started working with NSI Partners. Although we are a small company, they agreed not to accept a competing client in the markets that we were targeting. We have spent countless hours over the years identifying our target markets and have invested money for them to market our site. Over the past 5 years, we have continued to use their services. In fact, we are currently working with them now. Mutual respect for good business principals like ethics, integrity, trust and loyalty are something that money can't buy. Respectfully, Heather Davis, Owner/Marketing Director The Cozy Moose, Inc http://www.mooseheadcabins.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Michael Linehan Subject: Conflict of Interest > I explained that I am in the web design business not the > trellis business, and felt that by not accepting this work, > was similar to him only selling his trellis to one builder > and not all the other carpenters in the district. Irrelevant, in a sense. Even if all readers here think you are fine, it doesn't matter if that first client thinks you are a jerk. You'll have made an enemy, and an enemy will be far more to spread the word about your business than will any satisfied client. It's not the same as selling trellis - a banal, common product. If you are doing a website, the quality of your work could, in theory, make or break a business. Much more powerful than than a piece of trellis. I would consider it closer to being a marketing consultant for one company, and then being a consultant for their competitor across the street. Personally, I consider the conduct of your second potential client despicable - starting two weeks later, putting out an identical flyer two days later!!! Living in a small community myself, I see people that sound like this - businesses who come here and act like the worst clichéd big-city 'sharks'. That's not, in my mind, how best to do business in a small community. Here, I do work for B&B's who are competitors. There are so many, and many are very different in what they offer. But in real estate, there are only three companies - so I do work only for one. It depends on the industry. In this case, I wouldn't work for the second company, but I would try to explain why in a very positive and constructive manner - possibly passing them on to a friend. Michael Linehan Marketing Alchemy ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Michael Coley Subject: Conflicts of interest > As a search engine marketer, I would get clients > in the same industry... - Shari Thurow, LED 1895 There's quite a distinction that I think you're missing. With SEO, you can't do justice to two clients with the same keywords. If you have an ongoing relationship with one company, I think you're making the right decision not to take on new business within the same industry. Very few businesses have that problem, however. I could care less if my web host does business with companies similar to mine. I could care less if my graphic designer does business with companies similar to mine. I could care less if my competitors order business cards from the same company I do. As for the original poster, I think it's more like the second case than the first. He's just designing web sites. Both can get a superb web site. What he's doing for one doesn't have a direct impact on what he's doing for the other. Michael Coley Amazing-Bargains.com ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Rick Gortatowsky Subject: SMTP servers > Our current web hosting company does not allow us to > modify the from field. They insist that we send out all > email with a valid email address from within our domain. - Kevin Houston, LED 1892 > This is a huge issue with more and more clients these days... > I have dozens of clients who would happily pay for email services > that were reliable, service focused, and not "premium-priced"... - Kevin Jackson, LED 1895 Hi LED'rs! It's not uncommon at all for a host provider to dislike mass mailings or from fields that are not specific in regards to the senders identity. This is because they are the folks who get screamed at about spam. As we all know one can scream at a spammer all day long and generally get no place or scream to an email address that seldom even is valid at least as far as the real sender is concerned. Its actually a shame... The ability to mass mail and have the recipient respond to a email address or 'name' different from the original sender is a very powerful function with many uses. A marketing person might send out a bulk mailing of things on sale but the responses are to go to some sales rep. Marketing operations do this all the time on the Net. The solution is to run an SMTP server on your local PC preferably one with a mailing ability. This will circumvent your ISP's SMTP. We use AMail which is freeware and also comes in other permutations that are pay depending on your needs. See... In our case we needed a bulk mail ability to send customers from a point of sale (POS) the tracking information for their orders. It was a mess we needed figure out. Some places we vend goods at have us using differing price structures, at one site something might be less or more expensive than elsewhere. The result is a customer pays whatever, $5 more someplace, does a web search for the main mailing address etc. hits another site, see's $5 difference and goes banana cake. They dont care why it was $5 more, might be commissions we pay, might be balancing inventory valuation for a particular POS (so item A: is $5 more, item B however is $5 less). Many examples, price search engines etc. The solution was to set up a email address via another service, like say Yahoo. However, with a "Yahoo" how do we mass mail tracking data to customers? Cutting & Pasting data for lots of orders is a nightmare. AMail as a bulk mailer will take a delimited spreadsheet, insert and replace tokens within your template email with matching tokens from the spreadsheet. It has its own built in SMTP server or will happily use your ISP's. It allows us to re-direct any response mail in changing the "From" address. Problem solved. This is a good example of how allowing for some ambiguity is used for a positive purpose. Unfortunately so many Webber's have abused ambiguity that ISP's are hot to trot when it comes to mail servers they control being used for any ambiguity or bulk mailing. Due to this LOTS of places have popped up to slime the "Not in the know Web Pro". They will sell you services for ambiguous mailings at whatall $20+ clams a month or by the quantity (1000 emails for $10). Take a gander at Download.com and do a search for mass mailers or bulk mailers etc. No, it takes no advanced knowledge of setup for the SMTP etc. No guru meditation required. Look into Amail, its dynamite. Rick Gortatowsky Software Society rochnet.net ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Johnn Four Subject: Firefox > I'd like to put out an open call for practical feedback about > the Firefox browser... What are the real and practical > advantages of Firefox, besides just sticking it to Gates > & Co.? What are the disadvantages.? - Dirk Johnson, LED 1894 Just got my first issue today and thought I'd chime in on the Firefox thread. My apologies if my points have already been mentioned. > 1) What are the real and practical advantages of Firefox... Here are some of my personal likes: * Tabbed browsing (new, close, and drag & drop tab order, plus CTRL+TAB to cycle through tabs make browsing faster for me). IE has tabs through a plug-in now as well though. * Web developer extensions. Lots of great tools for web developers. * Better compliancy to HTML and CSS standards. I'll develop for Firefox first, which means my code will work well across lots of other compliant browsers, then I'll put in hacks for IE display. * Lots of community-built extensions, such as Google PR and spelling. * Stability. Lately, my IE has been crashing a lot. This could definitely be a non-IE, system-related issue, but Firefox has been functioning well in the meantime. I use both browsers all day as I find IE and Firefox each have their strengths and weaknesses. If I had to choose one though, I'd lean towards Firefox. Cheers. Johnn Four, Web Content Developer BioWare Corp. http://www.bioware.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Charles Oertel Subject: Firefox > 1) What are the real and practical advantages of Firefox... The information is all at www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ but in a nutshell it is: - Tabbed browsing - Pop-up blocking - Smart search built in to the toolbar (this page or search engines) - Privacy protection - Download manager - several others - automatic security updates > 2) What are the disadvantages.? - Banking sites written in VBScript. - No activeX controls means no MS auto update > 3) I have read that Firefox allows third-party development of > "plug-ins". Are there any of these available now...? Yes, there are dozens that perform a variety of things. I use the Web-Developers-Toolbar which lets me outline all the CSS blocks on a page, reveals page structure and class and id names. It also highlights table cell structure (for those still using tables to lay out their pages), and will resize the browser window to several preset sizes. The plugins are on the mozilla website and accessible through a menu item in FireFox. The plugins are all open source, which means that anybody and everybody can check them for viruses. You can rest assured that any plug-in that has been downloaded a few thousand times from the repository will have been shown to be safe. In the time it took you to write this letter you could have downloaded FireFox for windows, installed it and tried out the plugins and already have had most of the functionality you are looking for. What are you waiting for? regards Charles Oertel FineBushPeople.net ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Veronica Yuill Subject: Firefox Dirk Johnson wrote: > 1) What are the advantages of Firefox? > 2) What are the disadvantages.? > 3) I have read that Firefox allows third-party > development of "plug-ins". Why not just download it and try it out, Dirk? It's free after all! A few points in answer to your questions: 1) It's more secure than IE. All browsers have security holes, but only IE has the ActiveX controls and the tight linking to the OS that allow virus writers to achieve "drive-by downloads", unwanted popups, malicious code, etc. etc. Personally, I also find both FF and Opera faster, more flexible, and more fully featured than IE. To name but two, tabbed browsing and mouse gestures have become "must have" features for me. The "find in page" feature is great too. I curse IE every time I have to use it because it doesn't have these features ;-) I like being able to tweak every aspect of the browser too, but that's the geek in me! 2) Errrrr ... can't think of any at present! FF is a standards-compliant browser and some non-standard sites (written for IE only) may not display properly. But I have to say I very rarely encounter any problems of this sort with FF -- much less frequently than with Opera. If you come across a site that doesn't work properly in FF, it is always worth emailing the site owners. Often, a simple fix to incompetently written browser detection scripts is all that's needed. And with FF's market share doubling in the last couple of months they may be more receptive than previously... 3) There are tons of extensions offering a huge range of useful features. You'll find them here: http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/main.php/Firefox The must-have extensions for me are mouse gestures, the tabbrowser extensions, and the web developer toolbar (these replicate features that are built into Opera). If you write Javascript, you might like the Venkman debugger too. The nice thing about this system is you can add just the features you want. But out of the box FF is already a very capable browser with all the basic features you need. FF is open-source, so its source is open to inspection for viruses and bugs (unlike IE ;-). If there were any built-in viruses, the developer community would get to know about it pretty quickly. Likewise for the extensions -- certainly the popular ones, which have been downloaded by thousands of people. That's my 2 centimes as a long-time Opera user -- I use FF as a backup for those sites that just don't work in Opera. Apart from testing websites we develop I now only ever use IE for Windows Update and MS's own site. Regards Veronica Yuill Archetype Information Technology Ltd http://www.archetype-it.com/english/ ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet." - Aristotle |
