Teamwork, Statistics, Signup Forms, Blacklists, and More!
Due to vacations, conferences, and the like, we decided to push off Resource Friday and move it to Monday. We were all looking forward to it. Who knows, this might be the first step in rehabilitating Mondays! Soon, people could be saying, “Y’know, I don’t understand why these old Garfield cartoons are always so down on Mondays, when we all know it’s the best day of the week!” They could be going to Sunday morning brunches, anxiously counting down the hours until Monday rolls around again. We could all be saying, “TGIM!” …Nah.
Part of the team
Steve Wolgemuth, Principal
Today at resource Friday I asked three questions to stimulate thought about some subjects that I wanted my team to be thinking about. I warned in advance that all three of these could trigger very long conversations that we wouldn’t be having. The first question pertained to YDOP: “If YDOP would go out of business, what would be missing in the world?” The answer to this question helps us to connect to our bigger purpose. The second question: “If you left YDOP today, could you be replaced?” And, “what efforts could you make to change your involvement at YDOP to make yourself irreplaceable?” The third question: “Can you easily think of things that YDOP has that you/we haven’t directly worked for?” And, “are you maintaining the discipline of gratitude?”
They were heavy, but inspiring topics – and we look forward to unpacking them together.
Not wishing to let the team down, I brought more than questions – much more in fact, as I has just had the amazing privilege of hearing Terri Kelly talk about her job as CEO of W. L. Gore and Associates. (Ever hear of GoreTex?) I explained the culture of Gore that was needed to maintain a climate of innovation. They kept a smaller feel to each location in order to maintain a collaborative, peer based leadership model. The Gore family created an environment where innovation was nurtured by encouraging members to help each other become all that they could be, focusing on the work environment and belief in the individual. I explained that Kelly’s example of Gore was especially inspiring to me as it modeled many attributes of YDOP’s culture now in our early years. I’m really grateful to be working with such an awesome team in a great work environment. Who gets to say that these days!?!
Quick hits on social media
Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist
- Facebook has announced August 23 as the day custom tabs shrink to 520 pixels, which is the standard we’ve been designing to for the past two months.
- Google has enabled users to switch between accounts with two clicks, offering an alternative to the tactic of using two different browsers for two different user names.
- Nielsen released data reflecting that the share of time U.S. Internet users spend on social networks has increased 43% over one year ago. Average users now spend 23% of their online time on social networks.
- Neat and spacious fields (PSDThemes, for example). They make the form look more friendly.
- Big and simple icons that indicate the fields, like the ones on Nibbledish They help the website visitor visually.
- A little blurb on the form page about why people should sign-up.
- Interesting or witty sentences on the form, like on PopScreen or Roboto
- Alternative to captcha. Captcha that is not easily readable can frustrate people. So some of these websites use simple mathematical questions for the visitors to answer to avoid spam.
- The sender or the sender’s domain has behaved in ways that would represent a spam server (i.e. many emails being sent out in a very short time)
- The email message contains links to domains known to be fraudulent or inappropriate for web audiences
- The email message originates from a domain known to be fraudulent or inappropriate for web audiences
As social media users get more overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information they are expected to digest, tools like Feedera help the most-shared content rise to the top and appear in your inbox in a concise daily e-mail.
No lies, just statistics
Jeff Burkholder, Engineer/Analyst
I talked to the group about an analytics service that not only provides realtime stats (that is, see how many people are logged into your site right now, but also allows you to track individual user paths through your site, rather than giving you aggregated data, like Google Analytics. I’m doing some experimenting on this for now, but it’s something that I think could be useful for our clientèle.
I also talked briefly about why Email Open Rate is an increasingly bad statistic for marketing metrics. Largely, this stat is based on the number of times a call-out to a web-based 1x1px image that’s included in an email is accessed. Anytime someone opens the email, the image is downloaded, and the number of downloads is tracked as the number of times the email was opened. Except that most modern email programs don’t automatically open images anymore, but instead ask you if you want to download them. Also, people who do their emailing via text on a mobile device, or who look at the subject and snippet line of their email prior to actually opening anything would skew the numbers. People who monitor marketing metrics may want to start looking for a new method of tracking…
Sign Up!
Astrid Salim, Creative Director
Here at YDOP, we always try to make sign-up forms on the websites that we created as simple and less intimidating as possible. Dzineblog.com has a very nice a compilation of great sign-up forms which shows people that filling out a form doesn’t have to be a nightmare.
I think these are some great elements that you want to consider to have on your sign-up form on your website:
So, make your sign-up form interesting!
Spam and the blacklist
Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer
As internet use and electronic forms of communication increase in popularity, spammers are sending more messages as well. While some email accounts get very little spam, others can be flooded with thousands per day. One reason for such a huge difference in number of spam messages received is based on email blacklists.
Many email providers will utilize one or more blacklist service to determine whether or not a message is spam. There are many ways that this is determined:
If a message is flagged as spam by a blacklist, the message will be rejected by the receiving server, and the sender will get a message back. Note: There are also spam blockers that work on a rule basis on the receiving server and the user’s client, such as Outlook, that can catch emails based on the sender or content. These will not return an error to the sender.