Simply Put the agency blog

With the explosion of the social media landscape, marketers today have a lot more vehicles to choose from to carry their messages. But of those options, email marketing still holds its ground as a prominent and commonly used medium. What seems to have also not changed are the difficulties that those who produce creative work for emails continue to encounter.

We’ve come a long way from using Microsoft Word email templates, and designers today are doing phenomenal work within the tiny borders of an email client. The problem? With so many different modern email platforms available, and none following any common set of standards in the way they read, interpret, and display emails, designers are facing a dozen-times amplified version of the Internet Explorer vs. Firefox vs. Safari war that continues to roar on today (though we’re much closer to finding a common ground now). Whether the reader is using Gmail or Hotmail, Outlook or Thunderbird, emails just aren’t performing consistently. Imagine deploying a marketing piece and never knowing how it will look to your audience. And this is just from the perspective of the sender - consider the accessibility issues that riddle the readers.

Having done my fair share of email templates for clients in recent years, I can understand the cries of email designers everywhere. And so it was a relief when I stumbled upon the Email Standards Project. From the website:

The Email Standards Project works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.

Launched in November, the Email Standards Project is an advocator of the establishment of common standards for emails, and is probably the closest thing there is to a regulating body in this field. The site even offers a helpful rating system of various email platforms based on its own acid test.

The winners? Thunderbird, Windows Live Mail, and Yahoo! Mail among a few others. Meanwhile, Gmail, Lotus Notes, and Outlook trail at the bottom of the performance rankings.

If we want to make the same progress with emails as we have with website standards, it’s important to spread the word and show your support. The Email Standards Project lists a number of ways that you can share your support, with blogging and linking to the site being two easy ones.

Read more about the project and why email standards are important on the Email Standards Project website.

Welcome to the new and friendlier face of Vdot Media. We’ve been hard at work since our last refresh over a year ago, but between all the new clients and projects, we’ve managed to hammer out a site that reflects the growth and evolution of this agency. We’ve come a long way, and every iteration of our history has always promised bigger and better things.

If there’s one thing to take away from this new site, it’s the excitement that went into building it and the excitement that comes with launching it. In true entrepreneurial spirit, we tore everything down and started fresh from the ground up. Through the Photoshop fests, CSS battles, WordPress hackeries, and copy wars, what we’ve ended up with is a fresher and simpler interface that delivers a more enjoyable user experience.

New on the site map is Simply Put - Vdot Media’s newly launched blog and outlet for creative conversations. When you’re done reading, I invite you to check out our revamped Portfolio for a showcase that finally does justice to the work we’ve been doing. And if you like what you see (in the portfolio or in the site as a whole), we’ve added some friendly ways to help you to get in touch with us. If you’re really in the mood, take a look at our team’s mugshots and pass by the jobs page if you think you’d like to work with us.

We’ve got big news for the year ahead and we can hardly contain our excitement. In the mean time, I hope you’ll stick around for a bit and see what’s new.

Happy holidays everyone and cheers to great things to come!