A big few days... WE05 plus a Grand Final!

Well, jumping on the plane tomorrow morning to head down to Sydney for Web Essentials 05. Can't believe how quickly it's come around!

In my infinite wisdom I'm flying home on Saturday... and the North Queensland Cowboys are playing in their maiden grand final on Sunday! Didn't organise that very well, did I?

At least I have my Cowboys jersey to wear to the conference on Friday! ;)

Oh yeah, you can also read some other blogs about WE05.

Don't Click Here!

Ever had to try and convince a client not to use "click here" on their links?

Well, I have found a resource you can point them to. Want to read it? Click here!

Finally - A Tall Screenshot Grabber

The problem: capturing a whole web page - even the stuff below the fold.

I gave up looking for something that did this and have been manually taking screenshots as I scolled down the page, and stitching them back together in Fireworks.

But here it is! And it's a plugin for Firefox! How cool is that!

Edit 2007-12-06: It's actually now got it's own domain: www.screengrab.org.

IE Developer's Toolbar

How long has the Firefox Developer's Toolbar been available? Well, Microsoft have finally introduced their own for IE.

If you still use it.

Do any developers still use IE for anything other than checking if their sites display okay in it?

Making the most of your images

If any of you are interested in marketing and you're not getting the Sherpa Weekly, go kick youself in the head, and then come back to your computer and sign yourself up.

This week Anne makes a couple of interesting observations about using images on your website.

1. If you have a photo or image on your page, people will usually notice it. Many will also try and click on it. If your image is not clickable, what opportunities are you missing?


2. People will usually read text directly under an image. The lesson? Use captions! We're very well trained to look for these in print media - and this is one convention that makes sense in the online world as well.

One example I read somewhere (might have been another Marketing Sherpa article) was that you should use a link on product photos to take you to a page with not just a larger photo but also an "Add to Basket" button as well. The visitor has expressed interest in the product - why make extra work for them if they want to buy?

As for the captions, we've seen research that shows how little of the page content actually gets noticed - putting critical info in captions might be a good idea. Certainly can't hurt!

Yarrrrrrrr

Yep - it's that time of year again!

September 19 is International Talk Like A Pirate Day!

So make sure you be brushin up on ye pirate talk...

Goldmine? Try Landmine.

Goldmine must be the most complicated piece of software ever written. Sure, it might be powerful - but for a small to medium business, it's about as difficult as it gets.

Picture this scenario: I want to do a mail merge.

That's all - just a mail merge. Should be simple - right? Wrong.

I had a client call for some help with this yesterday, and after 2 hours of frustration, I finally got it figured. What a drama!

So if you need to do a mail merge in Goldmine, here's what you need to do:

1. First of all, you need to install a plugin to insert Goldmine fields in Microsoft Word. It is a free download from the Goldmine website, but I challenge you to find it. Took me 15 minutes just to find the download, after I'd spent however long discovering that I actually needed this plugin in the first place! You would think that something as fundamental as this would be easy to find.


2. Once you've got that far and inserted your fields, save the doc as a Goldmine Template from the Goldmine menu.


3. In Goldmine, do your lookup and select the contacts you'd like to include in your merge.


4. Click Schedule, then Literature Request.


5. Now, Goldmine will present you with a list of documents here that you can use for your merge. Don't choose any of them! What you have to do is select your document from the "Cover Letter" drop down list. Obvious, hey?


6. Click the Group Schedule tab and tick the selected contacts.


7. Then click the Schedule button.


8. Click View from the Menu, then Literature Fulfillment.


9. In the Literature Requests list, under Today, highlight all the contacts listed there.


10. Click the Fulfill button.

This might be great if you have a different department on a different floor that does the actual mail merge - but how many small/medium businesses have that?

If you're a corporate user, fine. Small to medium businesses: stay away! Aaaaaaaargh!