Unfortunately, the house is probably fine, but some third thing I hadn’t thought of came up: it was all an elaborate (kind of) scam. Luckily, I’m real smart and sniffed it out within the first sentence, somewhere in the red area:

“Hello ,
Thanks for you response,I am the owner of the property you interested on,a missionary with the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church in West Africa…”

I was sad, even though I knew it was too good to be true, I felt like you do when you fool yourself into believing your Powerball ticket is, “really going to hit this time,” and then, you know.

Anyway, of course the email ended up asking for a bunch of my information, and even better, the sender’s name is apparently, “Am Nice,” so clearly, this is someone with a psychology degree… but I was about to find that beyond that, this evil genius was also well-versed in the dark arts of email marketing. *cue: buh-buh-BUH!*

I did a quick search of the phone number, which, yes, goes somewhere in Pankshin, Africa (that was as far as I felt like researching), where I assume I was to pay my first month’s rent. Google showed me a blog covering this Craigslist scam with a copy of the email they had received, and lo and behold, there were slight variations – this person is A/B testing their emails, I thought… and then I told everyone in the office, then I thought, what a good blog idea… and then, erm, now.

First variant:
My email: The sender’s name is the aforementioned Am Nice. I laughed at first wondering if they really thought that would work, but then I was like, oh, maybe this person had hippie parents, I mean, I went to school with a guy whose last name was Nice. For a moment, I felt bad for Am Nice, the barely literate home renter.

Email B: The signee’s name is Howard Bradshaw. I feel like, already, this one surely has the edge out of the gate.

Second Variant:
My email:
“Hello ,
Thanks for you response,I am the owner of the property you interested on,a missionary with the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church in West Africa.I am presently serving as Camp Director with the United Methodist Church in West Africa, Nigeria.”

Email B:
“Hello , Thanks for you response,I am the owner of the property you interested on,a missionary with the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church International, I am presently serving as Camp Director with the United Methodist Church in West Africa, Nigeria.”

Interesting. Perhaps the “International” would have allayed my fears for a split second longer? I mean, you can’t flat-out say that you’re part of an African church off the top – the “missionary” bit hardly covers it, does it? At this point already I wish I could see this guy’s (or girl’s) analytics.

Third Variant:
My email:
“Note:  We Intend selling the property before my wife reason to it that we should not sell it any longer,that the best way is to rent for future purpose,so if in case you drive by and see a sign board with a number on it,please disregard it,be cos we have ask them to get the sign of our property that we are not selling any longer,that it’s for rent now by us…”

Email B: Wisely, this version left out the whole, “Hey, it might look like the place is for sale, but that’s jokes,” note.

Summary:
I’m willing to bet that this criminal mastermind’s B email is beating the crap out of A, but I’ll likely never know. Maybe after I post this I’ll email good ol’ Am Nice back and see if they’ll let me know how it’s going. Hmmm, I’ll have to look close at Mail Chimp’s Monkey Awards program, I may have a partnership in my future…

*ahem* Also, the moral of this story is that’s it’s smart to A/B test your email marketing campaigns, heck, maybe add a C in there if your list is large enough. Just imagine how sad our buddy would have been had he only used his clearly inferior A up there. Only the largest derelicts looking for rental property would have even attempted to follow through – imagine the headaches in trying to walk someone like that through the process of wiring money to you.

As a designer I understand the pull of using certain fonts based on looks alone, but unfortunately not all typefaces are created with legibility in mind, nor should they be. Some are created with the intent of being used as larger headlines, for special projects, or to just stand out from the crowd.  These sorts of fonts are generally not ideal for body copy. Type faces best suited for legibility are said to have three traits: subtlety, transparency, and restrained design characteristics.

The first, subtlety, is fairly self explanatory. Fonts that are too decorative, light, or bold are hard to read in big blocks of text and at smaller sizes. The second trait, restrained design characteristics, goes along with subtlety, but has a tad more to do with the technical side of designing a font.  With this, characters are easy to recognize, the white space within the characters is sufficient, and serifs (if applicable) do not call attention to themselves. The last trait, and the hardest to explain, is transparency. Transparency in type means the font isn’t noticed or the person reads the words rather than seeing the characters.

Another factor of type or copy legibility is size. It’s important to think about who your end user or reader is going to be. If you’re designing a brochure for college design students, they might appreciate that smaller 9pt font. But, if you’re making an informational booklet about say vision problems, it would make sense to use a larger size (no 5pt, curly font, please and thank you). Going along with size is color. In my research on the topic I’ve found that while it’s obvious that black on white is easy to read, white on black and lighter grays are not as much. When designing for the elderly or people with vision problems, reversed type and lighter colors are hard to read. So while it may look better, it’s always a good idea to know your demographic and design accordingly.

So what is the best size, color, and type face you can use for legibility in your body copy? Different people will tell you different things. But one thing is for sure, a curly font at a 5pt size is definitely not it.

If you’d like to read a more in-depth (and better written) article about type legibility and the reader, here’s a fantastic article from Linotype.

1. Make it more than just a keyword. A name made up of two or more keywords is often the first thing that new business owners lean towards – and is usually not successful. They are easily forgotten, confused with other companies, and can lack interest – in other words, BORING.

For example, when you hear bestwidgets.com, betterwidgets.com, superiorwidgets.com and greatwidgets.com it is obvious than none of them stand out in a unique brand.

2. Make it sound different. The name you choose should sound like nothing else. Here is a bad example – Claris, Clarins, Claritin, and Claria. It’s hard to remember which names refers to software, line marketing, antihistamines or cosmetics. Even if you did remember it’s likely that you would associate all words in one category.

3. Verb Potential. Think ‘Xerox’ or ‘Google’. A generic pronounceable word that means nothing is the best launch for a brand to become unique. Words such as these develop their own verb. There isn’t a day where you hear someone say ‘google it!’ If you hear someone spending their time saying “[your name]-ing it” then you’ve got a promising brand name.

Kudos Brandbucket.com

So here is the super simple way to to fix it: for every image tag, add style=”display:block;”. For example

*img src=”photo.jpg” style=”display:block;”*

Done! This post may seem a little behind the times, as the change was made two months ago, but I am still receiving emails from big name companies that haven’t adopted the simple change, yet, so the threat that your images will render with big white lines through them is still very real. Beware!

In short, you shouldn’t have to put too much time into your description tag because if you are making a website for your business, you can probably sum up what you do rather quickly.  The one thing you want to include in your tag are the keywords you’ve identified as your best or most often used words that people use to find your site.

What is it again?? A description tag is a ‘meta tag’ found in the head section of your web page’s code. It’s not visible on your web page, but it IS visible to search engines.  So, do people ever see it or is it only there for search engines?  Yes, people do see it!  It becomes visible on the Search Engine Results Page.  Ever wonder where that brief description of the page you’re thinking about clicking comes from?  You guessed it, it’s the description tag if it was written correctly.

Although it shouldn’t take too much time to write your description, and it won’t help your ranking position, it IS still very important to the PEOPLE scanning through the Search Engine Results Page looking for the words they searched for.

What happens if you don’t use a description tag?  Relax, nothing will happen to your rank position…  However, let’s assume your website is ranking high in the Search Engine Results Pages, definitely on the first page and “above the fold” (an old newspaper term now referring to the page you see before you need to scroll down).  Here’s where your description tag plays a big part in the overall success of your website. This is the place where you have the first chance to encourage, woo, entice, engage with your target audience. Fail here and your high rank could be meaningless. This is where “conversion optimization” starts.  (Conversion meaning – converting a searcher into a person who clicks and engages with your site – but that’s a subject for another day…)

The bottom line?  If you’re thinking that “this ‘ol description tag” isn’t very important anymore, think again.  Just because it doesn’t affect your page rank, it certainly affects your target audience’s decision to CLICK!

Fast forward to now.

As a content writer at Adcuda, a great deal of my day consists of doing research on the products or services our clients are selling. From my experience, I’ve found that scouring numerous websites and resources regarding a single topic is the best way to gain the most accurate information possible.

And yes, I do occasionally still check out Wikipedia for help.

It was just a couple weeks ago that I finally understood what my very wise professors were saying all along.

While researching a particular Italian product, I came across this:





Fortunately, the folks at Wikipedia caught it fairly quickly and edited the “creative” addition out before widespread panic could ensue.

After some further checking, you may be happy to know that the people of Italy are doing just fine and are not suffering from excessive flatulence. Boy am I glad that I check and recheck information.

We are always testing, always learning. And this time we could use your help.

Please take our website for a spin and give us your feedback. Don’t worry, you won’t hurt our feelings. You will be helping us to better serve you and our current and future customers.

As a thank you,  all participants will be entered into a drawing to win an iPad of your very own.  You won’t have to covet the one that your Development Director brings to meetings or spend hours at the Apple store playing Plants vs. Zombies.  I don’t know anyone who does these things, by the way. Purely hypothetical.

Enter the Adcuda iPad Giveaway by August 15, 2010 to join the super, cool group of folks who have already participated. One entry per person please and thank you. The odds are 1:999 and the winner will be notified via email and announced here.

Please tell your friends and colleagues. We’d love as much feedback as possible. Plus it doesn’t hurt to have all those folks checking out our website either.

We Love Typography

Would you care to spend one, maybe two hours of your precious time looking at endless amounts of typography? Yes?  Then this is the place to do it. This page offers constant updated images of signage, hand lettering and other samples of type.

COLOURlovers

Colour Lovers is a handy website for designers and non-designers alike. It keeps you up to date on web, print, and fashion color trends and also allows you to create your own palettes and patterns.

The FWA

Aside from being a clean and well designed website itself, FWA (or Favorite Website Awards) features the best of the best in web design, including a site of the day and insightful articles about design in web and other media outlets.

FFFFound!

Keeping up-to-date on trends is the name of the game in the field of design (or really any field for that matter). Since it’s constantly being updated by members around the world, FFFFound! is a great place to pick up on trends, see what other designers are creating and get inspired.

W3 Schools

This site is less about inspiration and more about brushing up on Javascript code and HTML tags. It’s a great page to check out if you’re feeling a little rusty on your web skills or are wanting to learn more about it!

Thanks for reading through and I hope you were able to find some inspiration (or at least an interesting site to waste some time on)!

Perhaps you should be.

In recent weeks, I’ve noticed a lot of local (and national) businesses jumping on the somewhat controversial Foursquare bandwagon. Not a Foursquare user myself, I’ve found myself wondering if I’ve been missing out.

For those of you who are thoroughly confused, Foursquare is a location-based social networking website that allows users to announce their location via other networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Users sign into the service and tweet or message their friends about where they are to unlock different badges and earn points.

Why do I think your business could benefit from such a thing?

This gives businesses, like yours, great insight directly into your customer base by fostering an online community. Better yet, it’s also a great way to offer specials and incentives to your frequent guests. By becoming a part of this little social network game, you’ll drive customer traffic and keep people coming back.

I recently checked out some Foursquare specials in our area and found some sweet deals. For example, the Starbucks down the street offers $1 off the new Frappuccino for anyone who becomes “mayor” of that store. I don’t know about you, but that would definitely get me to Starbucks a lot more often instead of getting my usual blended beverage at another place. What’s even better for Starbucks is the fact that it’s going to take me quite a while build up mayor status. Do you know how many visits (a.k.a. dinero) that means for Starbucks?

As a business owner or manager, you gain a lot of other useful information from this service too. I just think it’s a great way to market your business as well as showcase your awesome social networking prowess.