** Update :  maintenance was completed successfully, all services are running normally as of 22:10 **

We’ll be performing scheduled maintenance and upgrades this Wednesday evening (the 16th February), and this means that for a time, some Sign-Up.to accounts will be unavailable. This work will affect about 50% of our customers, and the maintenance window will be from 9:30pm until midnight on Wednesday 16th February.

We really hope any unavailability doesn’t cause too much inconvenience. Accounts will be affected in groups, and we don’t expect any one account to be unavailable for more than 30 minutes. Any scheduled or current campaigns will be paused while accounts are unavailable, but should go out within 30 minutes of the scheduled time. Please do relay this information to any colleagues or clients of yours who have access to Sign-Up.to or any of our associated products. We will keep everyone informed of progress from our twitter account so stay tuned to that for updates as the evening progresses. Any questions – please use the comments form below!

As you may have gathered if you’re a regular on our blog, here at Sign-Up.to we’re inordinately passionate about 3 things:

1. Permission Marketing
2. Creating great customer experiences
3. Technology

Or to be more precise, all of those 3 things combined. We’re always experimenting with new ways to help our customers engage with their audience and when that involves new technology, that’s even better, but only when we can do something genuinely useful, not just for the sake of using something new.

One of the things we’ve been itching to try is creating an iPhone app. Today we’re really happy to be launching our first one (there are already many more in the pipeline!)

This app is for the lovely Prezzo, the fabulous Italian restaurant chain.

As well as letting users find and book their nearest restaurant, browse the menu and view the latest Prezzo news, the app integrates with their Sign-Up.to account to allow users to register for, receive and redeem discount vouchers directly from their iPhone.

We love it when we can use technology like this – everyone wins. It benefits the consumer, making it easy to find and book a restaurant table and really easy to secure a great discount (no need to print out vouchers and remember to take them with you!) and it benefits Prezzo by giving them a new channel to engage with customers and an easy way to track usage of mobile vouchers and reward loyal customers.

You can download the Prezzo iPhone app for free (UK users only)

We realise that apps aren’t all about the iPhone though, so we’ll be following with Android and possibly even Windows Mobile apps in the near future.

If you’d like to find out more about creating a mobile app to link in with your permission marketing, get in touch!

The choices

Recently there’s been a lot of press surrounding browsers and which is the most popular, so I’ve gathered some statistics as to how browser choice affects us here at Sign-Up.to. The main players on the market are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.  Sometimes there is far less choice – for instance on a smart phone, or in corporate environments – something I’ll discuss later.

Here at Sign-Up.to our staff are allowed to choose their own browser. This is partially because we believe in freedom on the web, and that we are all likely to be most effective using the environment that suits us best (we also extend this choice to OS, although 90% of us do use Windows on our primary machine). Another good reason is that as a web application development company, we need to test and support our products on all main platforms, so we all have to have the main browsers installed anyway.

Which internet browser do we choose?

A quick survey of the office shows the following breakdown of browser of choice:

Not a single one of us chooses IE as our primary browser – this is a long way from typical! Most online “browser wars” monitoring sites put IE at over 50% of market share – and this is an all time low. So why, if so many of us run Windows, do none of us choose to use IE as our primary browser?

1) It is slow – although I’m aware that it doesn’t necessarily seem slow if you’ve never tried anything faster. As a Chrome fan-boy (often cited as being the fastest browser available), on the occasions that I switch to IE for testing I am regularly appalled by its slothful nature.

2) It is a law unto itself. If you’ve ever had a hand in front-end web development, you’ll know not only that it is important to test in as many browsers as you can, but also that the others all tend to behave in a similar way, whereas IE often ignores accepted standards and costs you precious time. Of course, we still need to use it – many of our customers use it – but it would appear that none of us loves it enough to be willing to put its colours on our mast.

3) Other browsers, Firefox in particular, have much better source code and javascript debugging plugins available, saving our interaction and design teams precious time.

Which browser do our customers use?

Interestingly, our customers neither follow the general trend of 50+% IE usage, but nor do they completely shun IE as we do. IE is used by around 37% of our users, with Firefox a close second (note our statistics are based on the month of October 2010 and exclude our own use of our systems).

So why are our customers more likely to have chosen to deviate from Internet Explorer? We think it’s because, like us, they’ve realised they can get so much more from their web experience with a different browser, and with web applications like ours, the benefits are far more obvious. For instance, while we’ve spent a long time ensuring our new email design tools are as quick as can be, there’s no denying that they are a little sluggish at times in IE – not so in Chrome!

As we progress in the Internet age traditional, static, information-only web sites represent a smaller slice of the pie, and content rich web applications are becoming more common. As this happens, the speed of your browser will become more and more important. Is this the end for IE? There are two reasons why I don’t think this is the case:

Internet Explorer 9 is coming soon

There’s a new version of Internet Explorer on the horizon: IE9. We saw the public beta launch in September, and just last week the sixth IE9 platform preview became available for test-drive. In their eyebrow raising “beauty of the web” campaign, Microsoft are assuring the world that their newest browser not only “introduces support for modern web standards”, but will also be much faster.

At this point I imagine you’re in one of 3 camps: you either don’t really care which browser you use, you’re a fan of a particular browser (probably not IE), or you’re a web developer in which case you are howling with laughter on the floor, unable to see for the torrent of tears invoked by sheer disbelief at Microsoft’s boldness. To date, Internet Explorer has been one of the slowest and least standards compliant browsers on the market – a real pain for web developers.

Mirth aside, it is good to hear Microsoft make these statements because it does suggest they’ve listened and have taken steps to put their browser back into a state where it can compete on merit. Many benchmarking tests have demonstrated that IE 9 sets a good pace, in some cases coming second only to Chrome’s performance. With full HTML5 and CSS3 support in IE9, perhaps developing for the web will become less arduous in the future. This is A Good Thing, but there is still one problem lurking in wait for us:

Large organisations are slow to upgrade their systems

So hooray for IE9 – if you’re lucky enough to work somewhere hip like Sign-Up.to you’ve probably already tried out IE9 beta. Spare a thought however for those who aren’t allowed to so much as set their browser home page, let alone install an alternative. Plenty of organisations out there, and many branches of the UK government, fall into this category, and are still forcing their staff to use IE version 6. IE6 was released in 2001, and IE7 replaced it in 2006. Still, nearly 5 years later, this browser represents an extremely disappointing chunk of market share – around 16% at present.

Despite this, Sign-Up.to does not support IE6. Sure, you can just about use our system in IE6, but it isn’t pretty, or pleasant. While 16% seems like a notable lump of Internet users, a tiny proportion of our clients use it, and what’s more, we’re not alone in not supporting IE6. Neither do Facebook nor Google Apps – two web applications that we use an awful lot.

What do you think?

Have I been too harsh on IE? I’m rather more positive about its future – but are you? What’s your browser of choice? Let us know in the comments!

We’ve just introduced a whole new set of email campaign creation tools, available now to all accounts as a completely free upgrade.

This upgrade marks quite a change in our email design process, so I’d like to explain our thinking behind the changes.

The biggest challenge with email marketing is often the design stage, especially if you don’t have an experienced email designer on call, or the budget to outsource your campaign creation. There are so many different considerations when building an email that it can be quite a challenge.

That’s what we wanted to do away with with this release, and we started from the point of view that:

Different people work differently

We’ve always provided an email creation tool that gave users complete control over their email design. This is great for users who are confident with creating and editing HTML based campaigns, but with great power comes great responsibility and the downside is that it also made it very easy to break things.

So, we’ve now divided our email creation tools into 3 distinct modes, to let users work in the way they prefer:

• Classic Mode: This is a visual editing tool very similar to our previous system. It gives you complete control over a campaign and is ideal if you want to be able to manually tweak your code. It introduces several major enhancements though, including multiple levels of undo/redo, inline image editing, enhanced social sharing tools and automatic code tidying. If you edit a campaign that you’ve previously made, this is the tool you’ll use.
• Code View: If you’re a hardcore geek at heart and see the world in code, this mode will let you upload, or cut-and-paste your own HTML code straight in. It won’t be modified in any way.
• Campaign Designer: This is our whole new way of creating emails, designed to do away with the challenges that can make building your email campaign a confusing process. You won’t see HTML code using Campaign Designer! It’s fundamentally different from anything we’ve done before and has taken over 2,000 people-hours of development.

In the rest of this post, I’ll give you a brief insight into why Campaign Designer is so different, how it will change the way you create emails and some of the thinking that went into it’s creation.

Resolve the obvious challenges

When building an email campaign from scratch there are several challenges that have to be overcome; we wanted to deal with these in a way that needs no, or very little, effort from our users.

Campaign structure: creating an email structure which looks the same in all major email clients is a significant challenge. We’ve resolved this by providing a wide range of fully customisable templates which work great in all major email clients and building the editing tools to maintain this consistency as you add your own content.

Images: adding, editing and hosting images for your campaigns can be a time consuming process. Now when you add an image we not only let you edit it directly using the fantastic Picnik editing system but we’ll automatically re-save your image at the exact size used in your campaign and at an optimised level of compression. Then we serve it over a content delivery network (CDN) to make sure it loads as fast as possible for your readers. No more worrying about huge file sizes or Outlook ignoring the fact that you’ve resized an image.

Managing content: templates are great for speeding up the initial stages of campaign design, but when you want to re-order content or add more articles, things can get difficult. Not any more – you can add and remove articles with just one click and simply drag them around to re-order them. No more worrying about whether you’ll break the table structure behind the template or how to add in an extra article box.

Changing colours: changing the colour elements of your email is something that should be easy, but because of the discrepancies across different email clients often isn’t. Our new colour management tools make changing everything from the background of your email to individual links easy (and we’ve got an upgrade coming soon which takes this even further).

Consistency in different email clients: creating a design tool which lets you see your campaign on-screen as you build it is one thing, the real issue comes when trying to ensure that things look the same when viewed by your readers in their email clients. They tend to display things in a very different way to a web browser.

We don’t want our clients to have to worry about this, so we introduced a new, behind-the-scenes processing stage for email campaigns. Before your Campaign Designer email is sent to your customers we apply a wide range of best-practice optimisations to the email code, from inlining the styles to adding work-around to correct rendering issues in different email clients.

Resolving these challenges meant building a brand new email creation tool from scratch. For the geekily inclined amongst our readers, we make use of some great Open Source code like JQuery and TinyMCE and have wrapped this up with a huge quantity of our own javascript code and back end processing to perform the myriad optimisations and corrections that are needed to generate great looking email campaigns.

Make things even better

Once we’d resolved these challenges we set about looking at other ways we could make the email design process easier, and even more fun. So we’ve added a host of new features including:

• Easy social sharing across all major social networks (including adding Facebook Like features) – just point and click.
• Unlimited undo/redo functionality.
• Automatic generation of a plain-text version of your email.
• One-click previewing, including live testing of Google Analytics integration.
• One-click removal of pre-set styles (if you copy across content we preserve your styling, which is great 90% of the time, this is for the other 10% when you want to change things).
• A wide range of new free email templates to help you get designing quickly and easily.

Campaign Designer is a fundamentally different way to build your emails – you drag and drop articles and edit pre-defined areas of a template, making it easy to create great looking emails as you can focus on the content rather than worrying about the code in your email. Once you’ve chosen your basic design it’s easy to customise it to match your branding and realise your own creative vision, all without having to worry about breaking things. If you want total control of the underlying code, then Classic Mode is still your best choice, but if you’d prefer to focus on the substance of your campaign rather than the code, give Campaign Designer a try today – and let us know what you think!

** Update :  maintenance was completed successfully, all services are running normally as of 22:36 **

We’ll be performing scheduled maintenance and upgrades this Monday evening (the 7th June), and this means that for a time, Sign-Up.to accounts will be unavailable.

The maintenance window will be from 9pm until midnight on Monday 7th June.

We really hope any unavailability doesn’t cause too much inconvenience. Accounts will be affected in groups, and we don’t expect any one account to be unavailable for more than 30 minutes. Please do relay this information to any colleagues or clients of yours who have access to Sign-Up.to or any of our associated products. We will keep everyone informed of progress from our twitter account so stay tuned to that for updates as the evening progresses. Any questions – please use the comments form below!

We’ll be performing scheduled maintenance and upgrades this Sunday evening (the 21st March), and this means that for a time, Sign-Up.to accounts will be unavailable.

The maintenance window will be from 6pm until midnight on Sunday 21st March.

We have chosen this time because historically our systems are very quiet on Sunday evenings, and it gives us the night to apply finishing touches before the week kicks off on Monday morning.

We really hope any unavailability doesn’t cause too much inconvenience. Accounts will be affected in groups, and we don’t expect any one account to be unavailable for more than 2 hours. Please do relay this information to any colleagues or clients of yours who have access to Sign-Up.to or any of our associated products. We will keep everyone informed of progress from our twitter account so stay tuned to that for updates as the evening progresses. Any questions – please use the comments form below!

As a rapidly growing tech company we have a number of ways that we measure our progress – there’s the typical revenue, profit and customer numbers but today I identified a new one – coffee consumption.

Towards the end of 2009 I finally got fed up with the inability of anyone in our office to make a decent cup of coffee – or to be more precise, to make me a decent cup of coffee (even after many, many hints). So, I took the lazy option and ordered a Nespresso machine to sit alongside our drinks fridge and fruit bowl.

I had my doubts about capsule based coffee machines, I’m now a convert. They’re quick, mess-free and now that Nespresso collect the old capsules for recycling my major issue with them has been resolved. Most importantly they give a superb coffee every time.

The major downside is that you have to order the capsules for delivery, so you need to plan ahead a little. It does make it easy to keep track of consumption though. Back in September this wasn’t too much trouble. The coffee drinkers in the office numbered precisely 2 (I don’t count those who like instant ‘coffee’ – but that’s a whole separate issue). Over the last few months though our numbers have grown and the aroma of fresh coffee has caused a few tea drinkers to swap sides and diverted many of our development team from their favoured caffeine source (diet coke).

Our first 100 capsules lasted 2 months, the next 100 lasted 6 weeks, then 4 weeks, then 3. Our latest order arrived today, I decided to bulk up – 400 capsules. As we’re adding another 3 members to the team this month I suspect these won’t last long!

In case you’re wondering, the red boxes are decaf – no-one will touch them. Unless we’ve run out of everything else like we did at the start of the week.

Those who design and engineer web pages (and emails) have long been aware that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) has been something of a thorn in their side. Even basic layouts sometimes require a custom IE6 style sheet, and the kind of modern web features that the likes of Facebook now employ to bring responsive and interactive web pages simply don’t work. As a result for quite some time now there have been campaigns like ‘IE6 Must Die‘ – a geeky read but an excellent example of the frustrations felt in the community. This campaign though has, until recently, not been as effective as that community would have liked.

A recent report by NetMarketShare revealed that IE6 still represents just over 20% of the market. This is because larger corporations and the public sector are often slow to implement technology change, so the ravings of a few internet designers and developers aren’t going to carry much influence. They’ve got the resources to ensure that their own sites work in all browsers, they don’t mind if this prevents their own web sites from being cutting edge, and they are generally insulated to the kind of attitudes and preferences that are advancing web technologies elsewhere. Facebook hasn’t supported IE6 since August 2008. Do large employers care that their staff can’t access Facebook from their office machines? Not likely!

Recently though, the landscape changed. Since hackers in China exploited IE to access some Google mail, it is security rather than beauty and functionality that has taken centre stage on the IE6 issue. The French and German governments went so far as to recommend their citizens choose another browser. Mashable released a new set of reasons why IE6 must die. Google have announced they will phase out IE6 support from March 2010. Today, there’s an article entitled ‘Pressure mounts to phase out Internet Explorer 6‘ on the front page of BBC news.

Here at Sign-Up.to we will be watching this situation with interest. Our public facing services – so that’s our main web site, the dynamic subscription forms our clients can automatically build, and our subscriber profile administration areas  - all currently support IE6. For our paying customers though (those who use our web applications to manage their digital marketing), we haven’t supported IE6 for our customers for around 3 years now. To ensure ease of use and accurate email campaign building it simply wasn’t possible to employ the elderly IE6 engine even then. This has meant that some larger entities haven’t been able to fully use our services, but this is a regret we must carry for the greater good.

With the likes of Facebook and Google now on-side, the campaign has surely gathered momentum. However Microsoft still pledges to support IE6 until 2014, so the date on its headstone cannot yet be carved.

I’m afraid to say we’re going to be massaging our servers this Sunday (4th October) evening, and this means that for a time, Sign-Up.to and associated systems will be unavailable.

The maintenance window will be from 6pm until midnight.

We have chosen this time because historically our systems are very quiet on Sunday evenings, and it gives us the night to apply finishing touches before the week kicks off on Monday morning.

We really hope any unavailability doesn’t cause too much inconvenience. We will keep everyone informed of progress from our twitter account so stay tuned to that for updates as the evening progresses

One of the key elements of your Social Media Strategy should be creating a consistent brand image across all platforms. This is often a daunting task due to the various limitations of each platform but in this article I’m going to show you how a consistent image can be obtained easily.

I’ll lead with Facebook as this is the least customisable platform.

You have very little to work with except the profile picture. You can add custom boxes to the left sidebar, but that is another topic entirely!

The profile picture can be up to 200px wide and 600px high, giving you plenty of screen real estate to work with. You should aim to fit your company logo into a 175px x 175px space, as this is the maximum section of your image which will fit into the thumbnail shown next to your posts.

Twitter gives us more customisation options, but is limited by an 800k file size on the left aligned background image.

Twitter allows us to change the colours of the sidebar, text and links as well as the dividing line between the main content and the sidebar itself. You can set these up to match your company colours, but beware of the contrast ratio if using a dark sidebar and light text as this may make your centre content less readable.

When creating your background image you need to be aware that the image will be left aligned, while the main content is centre aligned. This means that depending on the screen resolution the content could sit anywhere across your background giving you have very little room to place content.

On a 1024×768 display you have about 120px to work with either side of the main content, while on 1280×1024 you have around twice that. You can see the difference below

You will notice that the text on the right hand side of the main content is larger on the second image, to create this effect we actually place two pieces of text on the page, with the smaller of the two being covered by the centre column on larger displays.

To make sure everything lines up correctly, set up a new document 1280px wide and 1024px high. Mark three vertical lines, one at 125px, one at 885px and one at 1050px. Now mark a horizontal line at 60px from the top. This gives us our three margins and ensures that the smaller text will be hidden beneath the top of the centre column.

Twitter pages can become quite long, to extend your page downwards with a block colour to avoid the background repeating.

Like Twitter, YouTube allows us to change the colour scheme and add our own custom background. With YouTube however, the background image is centred and the file size is limited to 256k.

Because the background is centred and so is the content we can make our image any size and have everything stay in the same place. A 1900px square should ensure that there is no overlap on larger screens.

Create your image with vertical lines at 195px, 345px, 1305px and 1455px.  The two thin columns created are where your content should sit to be visible either side of the centre column. Again, style the colour scheme to match your site, but be careful of making text unreadable by choosing poor contrast.