Email: A Prospective Client’s Guide to Not Being a Jerk

Given the nature of our business, it's probably no surprise that we, like most web professionals, are Email People™. We have our smartphones attached to us all the time, we eschew actually speaking on the phone and handle 99.9% of our business via email.  But, as the internet grows, and more and more previously "unconnected" people join the ranks of users, we realize that some people are just not Email People. I wouldn't call them ludites, per se, but some people prefer to talk or feel that the phone is faster -- and it can be, but can also result in unfocused chats, miscommunication or overlooked tasks because it wasn't discussed in the conference call. 

So we like email: it leaves a paper trail, allows us to reference your comments verbatim and like most creative or development professionals, it allows us to focus on work and prioritize communications for specific times during the day. Does this mean we'll never talk to you on the phone? Of course not. If a client wants to talk over the phone, we're more than happy to do so, but email is our preferrred method of communication.

That said, some folks aren't Email People™ because, well, they're simply bad at email. Their emails can be lacking in nuance, tone and common courtesy.  We do our best here at Moxie to open emails with a kind greeting, to thank the emailer for their inquiry (should it be their first), to use full sentences and proper punctuation and to show respect for your clients with professional grammar and a writing style that conveys our warm and jovial personalities. We're not dry and we don't expect our clients to be.

But some emails we receive are quite terse, without any pleasantries. It's understood that email is meant to be a "speedy" method of communication, but we don't believe that means you have to be a jerk.  We don't need you to sugarcoat it, but it is possible to get your point across in a professional and cordial manner while still maintaining brevity.

We appreciate respectful communication.  You don't need to "ma'am" us or be overly prim, but please remember that we are business owners and skilled professionals, just like you're a professional at whatever you do.  We are not your kid, your neighbor, or, despite some misconceptions, your employee. We are experts in what we do or you wouldn't have hired us.  We will never accept verbal abuse, unrealistic demands or blatant rudeness.

But we also don't love overly familiar interactions, either. If you're emailing me for the first time, please don't call me "honey" or  "sweetums".  That actually happened once. SWEETUMS.  I'm not on the pole here, sir.

Of course, none of our clients are like that -- our clients are awesome.  Why? Because we will usually ignore emails that are condescending, grossly undervalue our skillset or use netspeak, grammar and punctuation appalling enough to shock a teenager.

What we love in our emails:

• Greetings -- At least for the first one. Say hello,for pete's sake!  We're nice!
• Thank yous -- If you ask us to do something and we do it, especially if we do it tout de suite, please respond.  We don't need you to pen us a sonnet via skywriter, just a simple "Thanks!" will suffice. It can even be on Twitter.  
• Acknowledgement -- To that same end, if we take the time to reply to your inquiry, please hit us back with a "yay" or "nay".  We put aside client work and time with our families to read your request, to do preliminary research on your website and to formulate a thoughtful reply. We understand that we aren't going to be the designers for everyone and that perhaps our timeline/budget/moons don't align, but at the very least acknowledge our reply.  Don't leave us proverbially hangin'. 
• Spellcheck -- We realized typos happen, we make them, too. But when your email is laden with abbreviations, netspeak or misspelled words, we are  less inclined to reply or even try to figure out what you're talking about.
• Hours -- We want things to be convenient for our clients, so we don't really mind if you email us on the weekends or on national holidays. But please know that we're likely not going to reply until the next available business day. We work on the internet, we aren't open 24 hours -- so please don't send email after email after email on a Saturday night expecting a reply.  We have families and lives and need downtime to regenerate our mojo.  You wouldn't like it if someone called your house 6-8 times over the weekend , would you? For us, it's the same kind of thing.

This post was inspired by a great article I read this morning called Professional Communication 101 by Mike at BoyInk!  He breaks it down much more specifically.

In conclusion, we love email. And we probably will love working with you, too.

So be nice, would ya? 

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How to Blog Better with BlogHer… and Moxie!

I think I mentioned this once before, but for the last few weeks, I’ve been contributing posts on blog design to BlogHer’s How to Blog Better series. Since some of these posts might be helpful to our clients and readers, I thought I’d toot my horn a little and link them up!

• How to Change Your Banner for Wordpress.com
• How to Change Your Banner for Blogger.com
• The Non-Designers Guide to a Blog Design Theme
• How to Create a Simple Banner Using Photoshop (Video Tutorial)

In the coming weeks, I’m going to cover how to create a seamless background pattern, some “do’s and don’ts” in blog design, Twitter background design, best practices for ad placement in design… and, hopefully, more!  Is there anything you’d like to know how to do or know more about? I’m open to your ideas! Let me know in the comments here or on Twitter.

Speaking of BlogHer... are you going to BlogHer ‘10 in NYC this August?  We are!  Kathy and I both will be there and we’d love to meet you. So look for us [in the lounge] or let us know you’ll be there so we can look for

you

.  It’s my first trip to New York, so I’m really looking forward to it. Hope to see you!

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How to Use Gmail to Manage Your Website Email

Just about everyone and their hairdresser’s granny has a Gmail account (Google’s email service). It’s free, it’s web-based so you can access it from anywhere, there are tons of applications that work with it, it (usually) blocks spam like a champ and it holds a boatload of archived email. What’s not to love?  We highly recommend Gmail as an email service and if you can get the name you want, it’s a good companion account for bloggers, if for example, you’d like to keep your “real life” email anonymous.

But what if you want to present a more polished web presence? What if you’re using your website or your blog for business? It usually looks more established to send and receive email using your domain name.  It carries a bit more grativas.  Would you hire a realtor who’s email address was luv2sell2u@hotmail.com (or @gmail.com or @yahoo.com or any other free service).  You might, but that realtor would probably appear more “pro” by having an email address like susan@sellyourhouse.com, don’t you agree?

Sometimes clients will ask us to forward the emails from their website email (yourname@yourdomain.com) to their free web-based email address. That’s an alright solution, but what happens when you want to respond to that received email?  It will come from your @freeservice.com address instead of @yourdomain.com.  And that breaks the tone that we set by sending to the domain name to begin with.

So, how do you send and receive email using your domain name?

Well, you can always check your email using webmail, accessing your email via your web host’s control panel.  They generally provide one or more options for reviewing your mail.  Again, this is an alright solution, it’s web-based, but… ehhh, the interfaces aren’t that nice and they’re not as robust as using something like a desktop-based email program (or “client”, as they are often called, that lives on your computer as opposed to on the web), say Outlook, Thunderbird or Mail for Macs.  But did you know that you can use your trusty Gmail account to act just like one of the usual desktop-based email client?  You can check your Gmail and send/receive your domain email all in one convenient web-based location. No matter where you are, if there’s an internet connection, you can access your email (especially handy if you’re in a serious relationship with your iPhone or Blackberry).

Follow the steps below to make your Gmail account do more than just receive chain mail and jokes about kittens from your Aunt Edith.

Step One: Get a Gmail account if you don’t have one

You can sign up here. Pick a name that you like or that corresponds to your business or use your own name if you want. Whatever blows your dress up.

Step Two: Make sure your @yourdomain.com email address is set up.

We can’t account for every web host’s mail set-up, so we recommend contacting your host directly if you have any questions about this. But usually, you login to your host’s control panel and find the ‘email’ section. If your email account is not already set up, go ahead and do so and make sure to write down your password, especially if they randomly assign one using a bunch of crazy numbers and characters. You’ll never remember that and you’ll need it later on. If you’re allowed to choose your password, go with something you’ll remember, but be sure to keep it secure.

Step Three: Make sure you have all your host’s mailserver info handy.

This information is usually provided when you initially sign up with your host.  Again, contact your host directly to get this information if you’re unsure. It’s usually something simple like mail.yourdomain.com. You will also need the SMTP information from your host; usually it’s the same as the mailserver information: mail.yourdomain.com, but your host may have something specific that pertains to their servers, so be sure to ask.

Step Four: Set up your @yourdomain.com email within Gmail.

This is where the magic happens. I’ll bullet-point things to keep it straightforward. I could yap all day.

• Log in to Gmail
• Choose “Settings” from the upper right hand corner of the screen.
• Choose the “Accounts and Import” tab in the yellow area of the screen
• Choose the “Add POP3 Email Account” button in the middle of the screen. A pop-up window should open.
• Enter your email address (yourname@yourdomain.com) and click “Next Step”.
• In the next window, fill in the appropriate information.  The ‘username’ will most likely already be filled in for you. Many times, the full email address is required here, as well, so if you hit a snag with just the username, enter the full email address. (i.e., instead of “yourname”, you’d put “yourname@yourdomain.com”—with “yourname” being, obviously, whatever the name is that you chose for your email account.)

  

  The “POP Server” field may automatically fill in the logical choice as mentioned above (mail.yourdomain.com), but if yours is something different, enter the correct information in that field. You probably will not need to change the “Port” drop-down unless instructed by your host. You can choose to leave a copy of the emails you retrieve on the server for safekeeping, but Gmail has so much server space, we generally don’t check this option. We also don’t usually check “retrieve mail on a secure connection”, as many hosts don’t support this option by default.  You can choose to label your incoming messages from your particular domain account or any other label you like to help sort and organize your domain email from your regular Gmail.  And, if you so desire, you can immediately archive your mail and skip the inbox entirely, though we don’t recommend this unless you’re a power user and know what you’re doing.  You wouldn’t want to miss something important; you can always archive it with one-click later on.

• Click “Add Account”.
• Congratulations! You can now retrieve your domain name email using Google.  But you probably want to *send* from that account, too, so on the next window, when it prompts you with, “You can now retrieve mail from this account. Would you also like to be able to send mail as yourname@yourdomain.com?” choose YES, I want to be able to send mail as yourname@yourdomain.com. and click “Next Step”.
• The next window will ask you to name this account. This is the name that people will see when they receive email from you, so be sure to name it something appropriate. Your first name, full name or business name are usually acceptable. If you’re going for anonymity, use your blog name or your screen name. It will ask you if you wish to use a different reply-to address, but this is usually not necessary for basic users. Click “Next Step”.
• This is where it can get a little confusing. You have two options: send through Gmails servers or send through SMTP servers (usually your website host’s mailserver).  The former is only slightly easier to set up, but you’ll still always have “Gmail” in the received email somewhere, so we recommend using the SMTP option.
• The SMTP information (smtp.yourdomain.com) will most likely already be filled in for you. If your hosts provides you with something different (as discussed in Step Three), use that instead. Again, it’s usually the same as mail.yourdomain.com.  Enter your username (same principle applies from above—it’s likely they’ll need your full email address here instead of just the first part) and your email password that you set up in Step Two. Do not check the “Secure Connection” option. Click “Add Account”.
• The next screen alerts you that you’ve been sent a confirmation email to the email account in question, so you’ll need to access the domain name email account using the web host’s control panel or webmail interface just this once.  When you get the email, click the confirmation link or copy the confirmation code and paste it into the field in your pop-up window and click “Verify”.

That’s it!  Ok, so it seems like a lot of steps, but once you see the ‘wizard’, you’ll see it only takes a few minutes assuming you have all the information you need at the ready. 

If you get stuck or you need further trouble shooting, here are some reference links:

• Getting email from other accounts
• Adding a custom ‘From’ address
• Leaving a copy of the retrieved message on the server
• Labels and Filters

We hope this helps!  Happy Gmailing!

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Categories vs. Tags and How Blogger Has to Be Different

At least once a week, someone asks about categories and how they work, what tagging is or why tagging is important and how they differ from categories.  Chapter 10 in The IT Girl’s Guide to Blogging with Moxie covers a lot of this info (and more), if you happen to have a copy handy (or if you feel like getting one *cough*). But, we thought it would be helpful to explain it here, in nutshell layman’s terms using food analogies because… well, we like food.

Categories

First, let’s start with categories.  In terms of blogging, categories are a way for you to organize your blog entries.  If you think of it in terms of a file cabinet, the category would be the drawer you keep that entry in.  You might “file” your blog post in the “Family” drawer, for instance.  Or “Recipes” or “Work Life” or “Ask Jenn!” (if you have an advice column feature) or whatever it is. 

Tips

It’s not recommended to create new categories for each post, to have many similar categories or to make categories longer than 2-3 words as it starts to become cumbersome and the archives become less of a usability tool, more of hindrance. Of course, you’re free to tell us to step and do whatever you like, but we’re just straight shootin’ here, folks.  Lengthy, cheeky category names were all the rage in ‘03, but these days, user efficiency and search engine indexing take precedence. Less is more.

Benefits

It’s direct, familiar, fairly simple organization.  What’s not to love?

Tags

Tags are similar, yet… not.  Kathy puts it really directly in Chapter 10, so I’m just going to rip her off here:

A tag is a simple keyword (or keywords) that’s used to associate or describe the content of something, such as a blog entry, a video or an image.  You are identifying the item with relevant keywords to describe it in simple terms.

I often explain it to people like this: categories are broader, feature-specific headings and tags are more definitive, more topic- and post-specific.  So, for example, if you write a blog entry about a quiche recipe you just tried, you might categorize that entry “Recipes” with a subcategory of “Breakfast” and you might tag that entry “recipes, breakfast, quiche, eggs, brunch”.

Now, let’s say after you post your fabulous quiche recipe, a month later you to go to a restaurant for lunch called Eggs Forever and have quiche.  You might organize that entry by categorizing it “Dining Out” and tagging it “lunch, quiche, Eggs Forever”.  If a user clicks the tag, “quiche”, they will get a cross-reference of posts—both your breakfast recipe and your lunch experience because they’re both tagged ‘quiche’ regardless of what they’re categorized.

Benefits

Aside from the aforementioned cross-referencing, tags come in handy when search engines come a-callin’.  When bots and spiders from search engines like Google and Yahoo are sent to index the content on your website, the tags, as well as the content of your entries, helps them organize and rank your blog depending on what people search for.  So, if someone goes to Google and searches for ‘awesome quiche recipe’ (without the quotes), your entry might rank well because you tagged it “quiche” and “recipe” and said “awesome” twice in your post, along with multiple mentions of the word “quiche”.  If you didn’t tag it “quiche” and “recipe”, Google might still bring it up for someone’s search, but perhaps not in the first page or two.

Tips

It’s encouraged to use tags over and over for more focused organization. For example, if you tag your quiche recipe “quiche” and then post an entry 6 months later and tag it “quiches”, you’re not going to get all the quiche entries when you choose either one.  If you tag them both “quiche”, you’ll get both quiche entries.  The tagging features aren’t smart enough yet to differentiate plurals, for the most part. It will recommend a similar tag to you as you start to type your tag into the field so you don’t end up in that predicament, but ultimately, what you tag is what you get. So make sure to consolidate similar tags into one and/or break apart certain tags for best referencing (i.e., “cocktails” and “cocktail” or “chicken recipe” might be “chicken” and “recipe” instead).

It’s also recommend, as with categories, to use limited words in a tag. You can have spaces in your tags, but that doesn’t mean you should write a novel. Keep it succinct.  Under 5 words is encouraged, 2 to 3 is recommended.  On some community websites it’s considered “cool” or “in” to use the tags to write pithy things or little sentences like “side notes” instead of putting it right in their primary text. (Flickr is an example.)  These are sometimes funny and that’s ok, too. If that’s how that community rolls, that’s cool… it’s just not particularly helpful from a usability standpoint.

We also recommend, and we say this with love, that you don’t go

nuts

with the tags.  A handful is generally considered reasonable, but under 10 most definitely.  There’s nothing more annoying than reading a lovely blog entry only to have it capped off by a 10-line paragraph of “relevant” tags that don’t really help their search engine ranking despite what the blog owner may think.  At a certain point, Google starts ignoring duplicate keywords.  They’re no fools.

Again, keep it focused.  If your post is about the previously mentioned lunch out at Eggs Forever, you’d want to tag it as I mentioned above, “lunch, quiche, Eggs Forever”, not “review of local restaurant Eggs forever, best quiche I’ve ever had, lunch with Jane”.  Why? Well, unless you plan to have multiple entries with “best quiche I’ve ever had”, it doesn’t really help anyone in terms of site organization.  Such wording could potentially help someone on a search engine looking for “best quiche” but we all know the best quiche is

your

recipe. Duh!  But, if you hang with Jane a lot, you might want to add “Jane” to the list of tags.

Blogger and Their Platform-Specific “Labels”

Google’s Blogger is a popular choice for bloggers seasoned and new alike. Inherently, their chosen method of organization is not evil, but it can pose some challenges.  With Blogger, in lieu of tags or categories, they choose to use what they call “labels”.  They are treated like tags, for all intents and purposes.  In our professional opinion, all of the rules and guidelines for tags would apply to Blogger’s labels with one exception.

Benefits

Since there is no differentiation between categories and tags, the organization is pretty straightforward. It’s all the same thing, easy peasy.

Caveats

Because everything is all the same thing and people tend to abuse them with too many or too wordy labels (tags), it can get a little out of control.  Everything is lumped in together and therefore, can take more time to sift through.

If you’ve chosen Blogger because it’s free, you’re new to blogging and just wanted to get your feet wet, but intend to move to another blog platform like Wordpress or Movable Type in the future, take heed:  your Blogger labels will import as categories in Wordpress, not tags.  Your labels also import into Movable Type as categories, not tags.  So this could pose a problem if you’ve been a little label maniac.

Tips

Keeping that in mind, you might want to consider labeling your entries more broadly, like a category.  But if you and Blogger are BFFs and you never intend to leave, then we recommend labeling as you would if it were a tag.  But, as we said, don’t go nuts. Ultimately, if you do migrate to another platform like Wordpress or Movable Type and all your labels import as categories, you can always go back and add, remove, delete and otherwise edit the categories of your entries at your discretion. So all is not lost!

You definitely don’t need to choose between categories and tags… some prefer just categories, others just tags, but sometimes it’s best to take advantage of both.  For some blogs, tagging can be more of a frivolous addition, like if you blog about your day-to-day, random thoughts that are just fun and recreational jabber (like mine), but if your blog is information-specific or receives a great deal of traffic, such as a blog about real estate or cooking or if your site is a community atmosphere where many people congregate, tagging can be really useful for your readers.

The choice is yours how you organize your blog, but these are some basics to help you get an understanding of what each term is and what it does along with some tips and recommendations to get you off on the right foot.  If you have questions about this entry, please leave your thoughts in the comments and we’ll do our best to respond as soon as we can. 

And, after all those mentions of “quiche”, if you’re really here looking for a quiche recipe, I’m not the type of girl to leave you hangin’.

Leek and Mushroom Quiche [Quiche aux Poireaux et Champignons]

Adapted from Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking

I tried this using a premade pie crust instead of the pate brisee dough that she used in the original recipe. I don’t have that kinda time… and if you don’t either, it worked just fine, though I’m sure the pate brisee has delicious merits. Here’s the recipe for the quiche innards, borrowed from the inimitable Smitten Kitchen.

• 3 to 4 leeks, white part only, sliced
• 1/2 cup water
• Salt
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 5 to 6 large white mushrooms, sliced
• 1 tablespoon port
• 3 eggs
• 1 1/2 cups whipping cream (Deb: I use whole milk)
• An 8-inch partially-cooked pastry shell on a baking sheet
• 1/4 cup grated Swiss cheese
• 1 tablespoon butter cut into pea-sized dots

1. Preheat oven to 375°F.
2. Boil the leeks over moderately high heat in a heavy-bottomed, covered saucepan with 1/2 cup water, two tablespoons butter and a teaspoon of salt until it the liquid has almost evaporated. Lower heat and stew gently for 20 to 30 minutes until leeks are very tender. Put them aside in a bowl.
3. Add a tablespoon of butter to the pan along with the sliced mushrooms, 1/4 teaspoon of salt and port. Cover pan and cook over moderately low heat for 8 minutes. Uncover. Raise heat and boil for several minutes until liquid is completely evaporated and mushrooms are beginning to saute in their butter. Stir cooked mushrooms into leek mixture.
4. Beat the eggs, cream or milk and seasoning in a large mixing bowl to blend. Gradually stir in the leek and mushroom mixture. Check seasoning. Pour into pastry shell. Spread on the cheese and distribute to the butter over it (Deb note: I’m not sure if it’s because I accidentally took it out a minute or two early, but I found the butter to leave a slight greasiness on top, getting in the way of a cheesy crust, and might skip it next time). Bake in upper third of pre-heated oven for 25 to 30 minutes until puffed and browned.

Enjoy!

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Wassup Plugin for Wordpress Security Vulnerability

Due to a security vulnerability in a 3rd-party Wordpress plugin called Wassup, one of our clients had their site hacked and their RSS feeds inserted with warez links and spam-like info.  We recommend that if you are running the Wassup plugin, you deactivate in the plugin in the Wordpress control panel and find an alternate source of stats tracking.  We like Mint!

How to deactivate & remove your Wassup plugin:

1. Go to your Wordpress Dashboard.
2. Find “Plugins” on the left sidebar and drop the menu open by clicking the arrow on the right that will appear when you hover over it. (It menu may already be visible.)
3. Choose “Installed Plugins”.
4. From the list that loads on the right, find the Wassup plugin and click the “Deactivate” link on the right.
5. If you also have VSTATS plugin installed,we recommend deactivating that as well.
6. Once that’s done, log into your server using FTP (or if you manage your files via server control panel interface, that’s fine, too) and go to /public_html/wp-content/plugins/ and remove the entire /wassup folder, as well as the vstats.php file.

Now, just because you have this plugin, doesn’t mean your computer has been hacked, it just means it’s vulnerable to it.  So deactivating and removing the plugin should resolve the issue.  If you are one of our clients for whom we installed this plugin and for some reason, you feel your site has been hacked or otherwise compromised by Wassup (bear in mind we’ve only received one report), please contact us and we will do our best to assist*.  (More information)

Thank you!

 

* Please note that Moxie Design Studios™, it’s designers and/or contracted developers are not liable for damages caused by a third party plugin security vulnerability, nor the existence of the vulnerability itself. Plugins and software related to Wordpress are open source, as well as free, and there is an element of risk to any Internet-related endeavor.

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