My son and I love watching movies together and now he’s a bit older there are more options. We watched the first Mission Impossible film recently. It was made in 1996 – nearly 20 years ago.

During part of the film, Tom Cruise’s character, Ethan Hawke, sits down at his laptop and opens a web browser – Netscape. Netscape was pre Firefox and even Internet Explorer I think. Mosaic and Netscape were two of the first web browsers I remember around that time – mid 1990s.

He also searched for information via Listservs – electronic mailing lists. You could join a listserv on a topic of interest and get emails, either individual or digests, from other members of that listserv. It was a very early social media. When I was at uni, I remember studying a Melrose Place listserv as an ethnographic study for a subject I was doing. I loved being able to combine my interests of television, writing and technology. And people were really passionate about Melrose Place which made reading their posts to the Melrose Place listserv very fascinating. You could watch it in a city pub on a Tuesday night along with the other Melrose Place tragics.

It was also around this time that I taught myself HTML so I could create webpages. There were no WYSIWYG software packages around then so if you wanted to create a webpage you had to know HTML. I’m glad I did because knowing the code serves me well now when I need to tidy things up a bit.  I could see that web content had the potential to be massive. And while web content has expanded so have web technologies. Using a hand-held device was something that was done in science fiction, not for real.

Web content marketing or web content strategy wasn’t a twinkle in anyone’s eye yet. My workplace at the time created a website for the organisation and it was very internally focused and it was a long scrolling page with no graphics. It couldn’t link off to different services we offered in more depth because other areas hadn’t jumped on board yet. I lobbied to get our department a website and after a while it eventually happened. I created the site, a graphic designer did some graphics and an editor helped shape the words. Each page was standalone so if a header or footer changed you had to do it on all the pages. Luckily there weren’t many pages.

We had no web guidelines or standards so it was do what you want pretty much. The IT department owned the website and its content and it stayed like this for a number of years until marketing took it over the web content side of things. Since then I’ve been in both departments in different organisations where web content is managed.

Now updating web content is a heck of a lot easier – although it depends on what content management system is being used. One I’m using at the moment is outdated and not supported any more so some things take a long time to do.

What’s still lacking in many cases is a focus on content. If I had a dollar for every time someone in a meeting mentioned how a website could look over focusing on content in detail, I could retire now. Yes, it takes time to get content together, to shape it and put it together in a meaningful way, but that’s why people visit websites, for the content.

Have a look at Coke’s website in the 1990s (above).

Remember how many websites used to tell us how best to view them? Remember how many screens – and we’re talking desktops here – had screen resolutions of 800 x 600?

Coca-cola refreshed their website late last year to be more of a storytelling device rather than a corporate website. In fact they said that “Content is king and the corporate website is dead“.

Their new website is certainly much more engaging than the earlier efforts and the refresh involved asking their audience what they liked, and checking metrics about what was being viewed and shared.

I’d like to know how it’s faring now and what they are doing with it moving forward. It’s certainly come a long way, just like the Mission Impossible films. Comparing the first to the last Mission Impossible films – 15 years difference between them – you can see how far technology and special effects have advanced.

What do you remember from earlier web creation days that you’re glad has changed?

Email is the most used form of digital communication and can be a very effective marketing tool. Below are some tips to help get your email opened and acted upon.

Consider why you’re sending the email in the first place

Don’t waste people’s time, or yours, by sending something that’s not valuable or helpful.

Why are you sending the email? This will inform your call to action (see below).

Use a descriptive subject line

This is the first thing that people usually see so make it descriptive. Maybe you can personalise it by including a first name. Make sure you have all the first names in your database if you do this though.

Think about the lists you subscribe to. What makes you want to open an email?

DON’T use the same subject line for each regular email you send. I get a regular email newsletter and the subject line is always the same. There’s nothing there to entice me to open it. I don’t care to read ‘what’s on’, I’d rather have a taste of what is actually on.

Email content and design

1. Keep it short.  Think back to the purpose of the email and don’t stray from that. Remember many people will view on their mobile phone. Campaign Monitor have tips about designing for mobile.
2. Remember people reading online scan content. Use headings and lists to break up the content.
3. Put the most important content at the top.
4. Write the email as if you’re talking to one person. Use ‘you’.
5. Use images but remember that many email clients block images automatically so they may not be seen.
6. You can’t use Flash animation.

Include a call to action

What do you want people to do after reading your email?

• Do they need to register for an event?
• Do they need to read further information on your website? Linking through to further info on the website is a way of keeping email shorter too.

After the email is sent

Look at the stats of the email program you used.

• What’s the open rate?
• What’s the click-through rate?
• Did you have undelivered emails? If so, clean up your database.

Mailchimp have some email benchmarking stats per industry.

Some examples

Two of the examples below have good subject lines – ie informative.

One of the emails below has an intro para with links to the website, but it’s probably unnecessary as that content is further down the email anyway. I think you could do away with the intro para and get straight into the actual content.

One of the emails has an informative subject line and gets straight into the call to action.

Which one’s your favourite?

If you had asked me 15 years ago if using animated gifs was a good idea I would have said an emphatic NO!

If you weren’t using the web that long ago, here’s a reminder of how they looked back then.

Remember the ‘Under construction’, and the famous dancing baby?

Best forgotten. They were pretty primitive – although the dancing baby was kinda interesting. Another overused animated gif was the flashing *NEW* for when you added new content.

Here’s a page full of them just in case you need to see more.

Here’s the history of the animated gif.

If you watched the video you’ll already know that the animated gif made a resurgence in the last few years, especially on Tumblr, and more tools were available to create animated gifs.

Courtesy of Ozneo Tumblr.

If you want to create your own animated gif then there’s heaps of mobile and desktop apps.

I love the animated gif to make a point about a tv show or movie that isn’t as easy to get across in a still photo. It might be a series of animated gifs, or just one. Or they’ve become a bit of an artform as in the one above. Do you know the TV show it’s referencing?

Don’t forget if you add an animated gif into your website, like all images, add alt text for web accessibility purposes. But think about the purpose of it in the first place. The gif above is starting to do my head in so for me it would really depend on the type of content I’m posting, and the message I’m trying to convey.

But to the pronunciation of gif, ie jif and gif? I’m a gif girl (with the hard g sound). How about you?