Categories
Site Reviews

Text-to-speech on e-mail newsletters

I'm looking into changing my e-mail newsletter from PHPList – which is pretty good for a free tool, but obviously lack features compared to pricy ESPs (e-mail service providers), and deliverability is of course smaller, as the ESPs spend a lot of time tuning theirs.

I'm checking out several ESPs, such as Mailchimp and GetResponse. One pretty cool feature added by GetResponse recently is E-Mail to Speech. It allows your clients to hear your e-mail instead of just reading it.

The quality of the speech is pretty good. I still prefer to read (which is much faster), but I can see busy customers – or customers on the move – opting to use it.

I'm pretty sure they'll post statistics eventually (unless they are awful ), and I'm very interested to see what the exact effect of this will be.

Categories
Articles

Question Selection Survey Results

Recently I read an interesting article from GetResponse about Survey Responses.

From the results looks like it's best to have radio boxes based questions, followed by check boxes. Of course, you do limit useful extra information that the user could be bringing on with open questions – after all, they can only choose answers you picked.

Nevertheless, it looks like keeping to mostly limited questions (radio and check boxes), at most 10 questions, with a few optional open questions in the end is the best way to get survey completions.

Categories
Software

Adobe Photoshop CS5 Fill and Patchmatch

I've recently received several videos about the new features of Adobe Photoshop CS5. My favorites were these:

I particularly loved the reconstruction of the ruins!

Categories
Book Review

The Web Content Recipe Book – review

I've recently read The Web Content Recipe book, by Rachelle Money, Ken McGaffin and Mark Nunney. I expected a good book, from the excerpts available on PDF, but found it was even better than that.

The book proposes to improve your ability to create good web content. Web content is important for several reasons, depending on your site, but in any case, fresh web content with well-tuned SEO content is a great way to bring in new readers and potential clients from search engines.

The first section deals with several principles, such as how to apply marketing to your content, how to write and structure an article, how to optimize them for SEO, and others.

The second session has ideas for what kind of content you could add – FAQs, tips and tricks, case studies, reviews and much more. In most cases, they have long, useful discussions on how to best write that kind of article.

The SEO concepts are throughout all the book, which isn't surprising since it's from Wordtracker.

The book was enjoyable as well as instructive, and certainly covers the topics well. I found many useful suggestions on how to improve my writing – including book reviews – and it was after reading it that I decided to add a blog to my site, something I've been postponing for a while. I usually take notes while reading, and in this case they added up to several pages, because there was so much to take from the text.

I can really recommend this one to anyone who have a site, and wants extra clients and search engine referrals (i.e.: everyone with a site).

Categories
Uncategorized

Welcome!

Welcome to my new blog.

I plan to post articles about features in our products – new, upcoming, or old and overlooked. And also reviews of interesting books, sites and software.