See my vCard for contact details

Social media provides us with a means of reaching out and interacting with a huge number of people that only a few years ago would have been practically impossible. But with the ever increasing number of social media sites we are on, for most of us it has become a nightmare to keep track of our profiles or even to decide which of our profiles would be the best to give out as our main point of contact.

The easy solution would be to create our own site and just add all our social media links on it and use that as our online contact card. Unfortunately not everyone has the web design skills to go about implenting their own site. This is where the Card.ly comes in very handy, it provides a very easy interface where people can easily add their online profiles, pick a theme and create a good-looking online mini business card of their own in just a couple of minutes. They are then able to share this out to the world through a very easy to remember URL – http://www.card.ly/yourname .

There are nearly 30 odd themes you can choose from for your contact card, most of which are free, though personally only found 5 or 6 that are visually pleasing (yeah I am a picky old SOD).  Some of the themes also have a stream tab, that pulls in your twitter and RSS feeds to display within your contact card, unfortunately the stream overflows the design borders, so I would not recommend going with this option atelast until they get better themes. What I really like about Card.ly is that it creates an online contact card that is hCard compliant and anyone can easily download your vCard by clicking the an icon under the title.

Card.ly also provides a widget that you can embed in your blogs/websites e.t.c to link to your online busines card. You could also pay $24.99 a year for the premium version which has a extra goodies like more themes to choose from, unlimited RSS streams, usage stats and advertisement-free cards.

Below is a screenshot of my Card.ly profile - http://www.card.ly/niroism

Screenshot of my Card.ly contact card

T-mobile dance viral

Dance for T-Mobile by Saatchi & Saatchi

Cut for Women’s Aid by Grey London

Diesel XXX SFW for Diesel by The Viral Factory

Laughter Chain for Skype by The Viral Factory

Whodunnit for Transport for London by WCRS

Happy Christmas from AKQA

Unboxing for Samsung Mobile by The Viral Factory

Extreme Sheep LED Art for Samsung LED TVs by The Viral Factory

It looks like Microsoft have really pissed of the designer and the web standards community. The Email Standards Project, Campaign Monitor and Newism have set up the website Fixoutlook.org to gather as many Re-Tweets as possible to show everyone’s disapproval of the rendering engine to the Microsoft Outlook dev team.

The site displays the avatars of everyone who has fixoutlook.org in their tweets as the background of the site. I guess this is one of the reasons why it is a trending topic as individuals who have no interest in the subject try to get their image/avi up on Fixoutlook.org

The campaign is now clearly viral with over 11,000 tweets within a few hours of the site going up, well done to all those involved in the campaign. Very remarkable indeed.

fixoutlook.org

MS Outlook2010 logo

Campaign Monitor have been fighting to get Microsoft to stick to Web Standards since Outlook 2007 first came out and they have more information about this, including a response from Outlook product Dev Balasubramanian:

“The reason for this lies in the benefit Outlook users gain by having Word as their e-mail authoring tool; rich tools like SmartArt, automatic styles and templates, and other benefits found in Word 2007 and 2010 enable Outlook users to write professional looking and visually stunning messages.”

“I am aware of where this decision on our part places Outlook from a standards perspective – at the same time, we ask that you consider the benefits Outlook users get from having Word tools in their e-mail authoring experience.”

“Having multiple HTML engines could reduce performance, as well as create an inconsistency in terms of what type of content the user is able to create vs. consume.”

What this would mean is HTML emails created in Outlook would look great in my friend’s outlook but look completely messed up in email clients of everyone else who don’t use Outlook. How does Microsoft justify this? Isn’t this just taking us back in to the propietary stone age!!

I really hope Microsoft listen to everyone’s feedback and actually do something about it!!

Step 1
Enable the web Toolbar by going to View > Toolbars > Web and checking it

Enabling the Web toolbar

Step 2
Type in the URL of the webpage to be sent in the Web Search box

Type URL into Searchbox

Step 3
Enable Outlook to send HTML emails by going to Tools > Options > Click on the Mail Format tab > Select “HTML” in the Compose in this message format dropdown box > Click OK

Enable HTML email capability

Step 4
Send the web page as email by going to Actions > Send Web Page by Email

Send webpage as email

Being a web designer it was natural instinct for me to design the HTML email using CSS. I designed a really simple light weight template using a couple of images and a grey background. The next step was to test this template across a variety of popular email clients and to my glee the template worked well across most of the email clients including Google, Outlook 2003, Yahoo and LiveMail. It wasn’t perfect as the background colour was lost on all the email clients except Outlook, but it didn’t really matter as the template still did its job well.

This is when it struck me that the default email client used by the students would be Outlook Web Access. So did a quick template check on it and to my utter disbelief the template had lost all its CSS styling. I tried different techniques on the template including using internal CSS and inline CSS but nothing seemed to work. This was a major issue as 98% of students would be using Outlook Web Access and if I didn’t get this right, it would be the same as sending a pure text email.

There was little I could do with my current template as it was clear that Microsoft have provided very little to no support for CSS in Outlook Web Access. So it was back to the drawing board and I decided to discard everything I learnt about web standards and web design and go back to designing a template purely using HTML and no CSS styling. Back to the caveman era thanks to Microsoft. The re-designed template worked like a charm in Outlook Web Access and to my surprise in most of the other major email clients except Yahoo Mail where the spacing between paragraphs was lost.

Designing a template purely using HTML and no CSS styling. Back to the caveman era thanks to Microsoft.

I checked a few HTML emails sent by major organisations such as Amazon, Tiscali e.t.c and found that their templates were also flawed on Outlook Web Access.

Below are a few pointers that you may find useful when designing your own HTML emails –

1. HTML email template layout designed using tables rather than divs seem to be better supported by email clients.
2. Avoid using background images as many of the email clients don’t display them
3. If using styles, inline styles are the way to go, though if correct display on Outlook Web Access is important to you then don’t use CSS styles just stick to designing using HTML.
4. Do not use images to highlight important content as images are switched off by default on major email clients.
5. For the same reason as above ensure all images have ALT text.

Happy Designing….

Useful Links –

A Guide to CSS support in Email by Campaign Monitor

Woes of Designing for Outlook 2007 by Campaign Monitor

Gore the environmentalist

Dot Eco LLC has now got the powerful backing of former US vice president Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection.

“This is a truly exciting opportunity for the environmental movement and for the Internet as a whole.” – said Mr.Gore

Al Gore, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his campaign on climate change and an Oscar for his film An Inconvenient Truth – a documentary about global warming – is also the co-founder and chairperson of the Alliance for Climate Protection.