| |
Home
Services
Web site
promotion
Ezine Promotion
Ezine Ads
Site Design and
Hosting
Personal
consultation
Products
Merchant
Accounts
Free Trials:
Web Position Gold
E-ditor Pro Ebook
Net Detective
Articles
Online list
By autoresponder
|
 |
|
-
------------------
Are Your Email Messages
Good Looking?
by Jim Daniels
---------------------
"Good looks" are very important in an email
message. This
is often overlooked by many email users. It is a fact
that an
email’s content is diluted greatly if the message
itself is "not
good looking".
Have you ever received an email message that looks
something
like this...
>Thank you for requesting more information about our
>services!
>We here at ABC Company would like to present a
>special offer to
>all of our cherished customers.
There are two main reasons why email messages turn out
looking like this. Although the reasons are quite simple,
many
email users don’t understand them.
Reason number one is called line length. When composing
email, most people just type and type without using a
hard
carriage return. If it looks fine when you’re done,
your email
program probably automatically wraps the words in a nice
legible format. This word wrap is usually done based on a
line length of anywhere from 70 to 80 characters.
Well, lets say I receive your message, but my email
program
doesn’t have the capability of automatically
wrapping incoming
messages. Since you performed no hard "end of
line" carriage
returns when typing your message, my email software
thinks
it’s one long sentence. Now your nice, easy to read
message
looks like that example above.
O.K. So how do you avoid this problem? Simple! When
composing email messages, use a hard carriage return
before
you get to the end of each line. I have found that a
maximum
line length of 64 works to alleviate this problem almost
completely! Of course, you’ll always run into an
instance
occasionally, depending on your recipients settings, but
this
should do the trick 95% of the time!
Another reason people encounter "funny looking"
email
messages is called proportional character fonts. Like I
mentioned earlier, all email programs are different.
Therefore
the fonts used by each program varies widely. Basically,
there
are fixed pitch fonts like Courier (found on Eudora) and
there
are proportional spaced fonts (like AOL and Compuserve
email).
With fixed-pitch fonts, all characters in a paragraph
will line up
directly above each other. With a proportional-spaced
font,
CAPS, space bars and other keystrokes are wider, so each
line is a different length. The bottom line is this. If
you create a
message using one type of font and send it to an email
recipient
using the other, the message will not look the same when
they
receive it!
Once again, the solution is simple! By using a hard
carriage
return before the end of the line you can keep these
problems
caused by the difference in email programs to a bare
minimum.
If you plan on sending the same message to multiple
recipients,
or attempt any drawings, consider testing the message
with a
friend on another service.
There is a third way for your email messages to look bad.
Although it is far less likely to happen, you should be
aware of
it. Many word processing or text editor programs allow
you to
save a file as another format. (Such as ascii.) It may
look great
to you, but when sent via the internet it can become
scrambled.
You may have received one of these messages at one time
or
another. They are easily recognized by the repeated
"U"
characters in the text. To avoid this problem, simply use
the
cut/paste or copy/paste method to extract text from a
document
in other programs.
The last thing you want is an email message with great
content,
being dismissed simply because it wasn’t "good
looking" enough!
==============================================
Article by Jim Daniels of JDD Publishing Company. Come
see
why JDD has been featured in major publications by Inc.,
Opportunity, and PC Novice! Jim has been marketing online
since the early days of cybermarketing and he knows what
it
takes to make money. Stop by his site and check out the
many ways he can help YOU! -
<http://www.bizweb2000.com>
Add value to your website and essential content to your
online
newsletter with the Free 'Information Direct' Publishers
Pack.
Email: mailto:free@advance.to?subject=free for instant
start-up!
==============================================
|
 |
Willie Crawford
Discussion Board
Domain Search
Partner Resources
Testimonials
Guarantee
Privacy Policy
Contact Us
|
 |
