As if that wasn’t enough, tomorrow I’m attending (or at least partially) the BrightonSEO conference, and next week I’m attending Carsonified’s Future of Mobile conference up in London. Busy, busy, busy, as in between that I actually have client work – imagine that! So why am I bothering if, as a freelancer, I have to pay to attend and lose a potential day’s work?

Conferences represent not only a good place to network and meet new (and old) peers, they’re also a unique opportunity for personal growth and career development. Rarely are they a random assortment of random people talking about random things. Instead they’re carefully curated to deliver a well-rounded and often thematic experience, with speakers selected based on their influential thinking, their prominence, or just for talking about what’s ‘next’.

The conferences I’ve attended in the past (eConsultancy’s ‘Future of Digital Marketing‘, as one example) have always been chosen specifically because they offered insight into ideas and concepts that I couldn’t normally access, be it in my then full-time job or more recently as a freelancer. The option to just listen and learn is what makes conferences so attractive (for me, at least).

So, this time round and like the conferences themselves, I’ve curated my conference schedule carefully, picking and choosing the content that I can directly (or indirectly) apply to my current, future or personal work.

As the always inspirational and sometimes abstract dConstruct helps to plant ideas for the future, the more mobile-based Update and Future of Mobile conferences are directly inline with my own foray into the mobile space, combined with a strong love for responsive design and evolution into mobile email design. The marketing conferences – staying true to my roots – keep me tuned in to what’s up and coming in that space, so I know how best to offer my clients more solutions beyond design & dev. Ultimately, rather than a mish-mash of random conferences to simply waste a day at, I’ve chosen this selection specifically to enhance my existing knowledge and learn new things from industry experts.

Attending conferences is ultimately a personal preference. From both a financial and content point of view they’re not for everyone, but if you manage to pick and choose the ones that will help you grow, you’ll find the true value, for both you and your clients.

PS If you’re lucky enough to be based in (or near) Brighton, I urge you to check out the fantastic lineup of the Brighton Digital Festival. There’s something for everyone, and of course it was designed and built by yours truly.

When I first came to Brighton in 2007, I couldn’t believe my luck. This city is a teeming, thriving technopolis of digital greatness. In fact it boasts the largest digital workforce in the UK, if not Europe. Go figure.

But all along, from working full-time and dabbling in freelance (which is, incidentally, when I was nominated for Freelancer of the year ) to going freelance full-time, the best part about Brighton has always been its digital culture. Second to none, Brighton’s digerati has always been helpful, kind, considerate, and of course massively talented.

So, when Andy Budd of the esteemed Clearleft crew asked me to take a crack at the upcoming BDF site, I couldn’t resist. Giving something – anything – back to the community was the least I could do.

Working with a great team including Aral Balkan (@aral) for site direction, Leif Kendall (@leifkendall) for copywriting and Honor (@honorharger) from Lighthouse for everything else, the site came along surprisingly quickly. With great feedback from the team (not least from Aral), the site is a responsively-designed index of all events, exhibitions, meet-ups and conferences happenings in September, sorted chronologically and tagged by event type.

The site is (of course) built on WordPress, and (of course) responsive, allowing for easy reading across any device. Keep your eyes peeled for the slow-morphing JS background.

So, if you happen to be heading to Brighton in September for any of the large conferences (dConstruct, Update, FOTB, etc), or just happen to be down here anyways, I highly recommend you check out the BDF site and the myriad of events available in September. Chances are something will tickle your (digital) fancy.

Have a project you want to discuss? By all means – get in touch!

• A social network (built on Buddypress) designed specifically for expatriated Anglophones living in Paris. With illustrations and creative direction provided by Brighton-based FentonForeman, the project saw CarbonGraffiti design & optimise the interface & user experience and develop the site on the Buddypress platform. The result: a full-scale social network where expats can meet, interact and share tips on Parisian hotspots and life in Paris with one another. The site, built in HTML5 and using @font-face and other CSS3 goodies, uses media queries and responsive design to cater to a mobile audience. The site will go live in Q2, 2011.
• A multichannel solution for a professional speakers management company in Australia – CarbonGraffiti created and launched a rebranded, MailChimp newsletter and accompanying WordPress-powered blog, to help the company grow their existing email marketing database and communicate with their readership more effectively. The project originally started as an RSS-driven campaign, but after determining the need for additional functionality, the campaign became a fully editable, branded newsletter to match the new blog style. The blog was built in HTML5 and will be used as the primary news and article section for the client’s existing website.
• Ongoing digital marketing consultation and campaign management for a startup specializing in the training and education of clinical research nurses. Services range from custom MailChimp template coding (based on a design by the illustrious Jon Hicks who also did the site design) to PPC and email marketing setup, management and consultation.
• Designed, developed and launched a website for a new startup offering premium accommodation to international students through purpose-built hotel-quality centres throughout the UK. The site, built in HTML5 and powered by WordPress, uses media queries and responsive design to cater to a growing mobile audience. As a result of this successful phase, CarbonGraffiti has been invited to tender for the larger second phase of the company’s impressive growth trajectory.
• Continued 1-day email marketing workshops in central Brighton, covering the basics of email marketing, from history, jargon and best practices to a hands-on demo and case studies. The courses are offered at Silicon Beach Training in Brighton’s North Laines.
• Designed and developed a custom MailChimp email template for an LA-based actress, to be used as part of her promotional kit and new personal brand. Based on the success of the template, CarbonGraffiti has been commissioned to redesign and develop the full website and brand identity.
• Ongoing digital marketing support for a well-known Montreal-based ESP.
• Gave a presentation at English UK’s annual marketing conference at the Westminster Conference Centre in London, focusing on ‘The future of digital marketing’ as related to the English Language Training industry and the many challenges and opportunities it faces today.
• A few basic trade industry sites we’ve designed and/or coded in the past have now gone live, see them here. The Garatec site was built on Shopify, coded by CarbonGraffiti for a local web agency.

That’s it?

That’s just the tip of the iceberg – we’ve worked with some great clients not included in the above list, and are always on the look out for more. If you want to be one of them, get in touch today.

The workshops are offered at the popular Silicon Beach Training in Brighton.

Outline is as follows:

On completion of this email marketing training course, delegates will be able to:

• Deliver an effective email marketing campaign from planning through to delivery
• Grow an opt-in list that maintains interest and drives revenue
• Understand why design, build and content can make or break your ROI
• Have the confidence to try advanced methods to grow a cost-effective, high impact email marketing strategy

Email Marketing Course Content

What is email marketing?

• History & Perceptions
• Statistics, usage, facts
• The HTML vs Text email debate
• Why dialogue is so important

Before the inbox – SPAM and permission-based marketing

• Factors affecting deliverability
• What is SPAM – how to avoid it
• Legislation to be aware of, including CANSPAM
• Best practices for avoiding junk filters

Starting the dialogue – building and maintaining an opt-in list

• Opt-in marketing 101
• Subscription tactics for your site
• Segmentation & targeting
• Integrating CRMs

In the inbox – crafting your campaign for ROI

• Planning your campaign – goals and objectives, acquisition vs. retention
• Know your audience
• Getting the frequency right
• Subject lines & From fields
• Making it personal using dynamic content and wildcards
• Writing copy for ROI
• Email’s next generation – mobile devices, rich media, the iPad

Designing your email – HTML design basics & tips

• Design
• Development
• Test, test, test
• Best practices
• Importance of the text version Tracking your campaign
• The metrics that matter
• From inbox to website – tracking onsite behaviour and why you should
• End-to-end reporting with CRMs

Real-world examples and best practices

• Great examples of permission-based marketing
• Great examples of multichannel email campaigns
• Great examples of bulletproof email design

Advanced email marketing methods

• Multi-touch campaigns
• A/B testing
• Use of landing pages for super-targeting
• Social media and email
• The future of email
• Beyond the newsletter – thank you, transactional and follow-ups

Email Marketing tools to use

• Tools to use for designing, testing and delivering your campaigns

Email Marketing Resources worth reading

• Resources to bookmark and frequent for email marketing best practices, tips, tricks and news

You can find CarbonGraffiti on the MailChimp Experts Directory filed under Email Design, Consultation, Training and Campaign Management.

Also worth mentioning

Using some good old-fashioned htaccess trickery mixed with this site’s new grid layout, I created a new landing page targeting users arriving specifically from the Experts directory. By tailoring a page specific to their expectations and needs, users get a better experience without being burdened with having to manually find what they’re looking for.

For some added flavour I cooked in a CrazyEgg tracking script, which will help tell me where visitors are clicking and more importantly where they’re not, as well as a Google Website Optimiser experiment to see whether a green or red CTA button gets the most interest.

See the MailChimp-only page here.

I went freelance 8.5 months ago, and what a ride it’s been. I’ve had dozens of new clients, more trials, tribulations and lessons learned than you can shake a stick at, have been offered 2 full-time positions (both of which I turned down) and have seen London from 30 stories high. I’ve watched my little girl go from a 3-month old baby to saying her first words, and I’m constantly grinning from ear-to-ear as she’s almost started walking.

All this to say that never once did I actually have the time to redo the website. There’s a phrase about how the shoe cobbler always has the worst shoes, and the same couldn’t be truer about those who make websites and the maintenance of their own.

Well, enough shoe cobbling. I finally got round to it, so here’s a quick lowdown on the new site plus some inner machinations and noteworthy notes.

Offering

The previous CarbonGraffiti site centered on one main theme – email design – whereas the work/portfolio page fragmented into both web design and email design work. This was a problem for the user and for myself. Firstly, I wasn’t doing myself justice as I have a vast background in digital marketing which wasn’t being made abundantly clear to potential clients. Secondly, the overall theme and message of the site didn’t seem to convey what I truly did. Email design seemed to be the only thing, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

This new site attempts to clearly and concisely explain exactly what CarbonGraffiti does, why it’s unique, what services are offered, and better examples of work done. The use of the Venn diagram mechanism throughout the site communicates the overlap in designing and marketing, a skillset that I find is harder to come by without going to a multidisciplinary agency (which equals much larger budgets).

Style

I love light-on-dark sites. I always have. But when a client back in December 09 mentioned that he found my (now old) site hard to read, I knew that any future site will have to finally adhere to a high-contrast palette in the name of business. I’ve always found that light-on-dark palettes are moody, interesting and look great, but let’s face it – from a new business point of view, they’re simply not ideal.

HTML5

Yup, it’s all in there. Knowing full-well that this is the direction we’re going in, and eager to try out newer technologies when time permits, this new site is built as HTML5, complete with section, aside, nav, header, footer and more. It’s not quite there yet though, as I’m itching to try out tricks with canvas, improve semantics using microformats, and much, much more.

CSS3

Such goodness. Viewers on newer browsers like FF 3.6+ and Safari 4+ will benefit from rounded borders, rgba background and border opacity, and of course some subtle -webkit transitions, namely the navigation glow and homepage animation (only seen by Safari users, unfortunately). If you haven’t noticed, @font-face is used for the body copy (Liberation Sans Regular) as well as the homepage header (Nevis), just to give the typography a little extra ‘oomph’.

Grid system

As you’ve likely noticed, the new site uses a strong grid system. Not only cleaner from an aesthetic point of view, grid systems allow Seamless changes, updates and edits to a site without losing the overall style. Without a grid, the last version fell victim to my constant tinkering, ultimately resembling a site held together with tape and blue-tack. Hint: Press ‘G’ on your keyboard to view the grid. Courtesy of #hashgrid.

CRM

Seeing as I’ve evangelised the use of CRMs in past full-time positions, it seemed only fair that I finally eat my own dogfood and use one for myself. After a diligent search for a CRM that was unique, user-friendly, fit my needs, and would grow with me as a business, I ended up selecting Batchbook by Batchblue software. The contact form on this site now feeds my CRM automatically, so no more silly direct contact form-to-email messages. Instead, I have an ‘in the cloud’ repository of my contacts, communications, opportunities, sales, and sale-related to-dos. I can’t recommend enough that more freelancers consider a CRM as part of their communication strategy, but that’s for another day and another post.

Email marketing

Considering my background, you’d think it would be about time I got a fully-functioning email marketing strategy in place. Using the ever-awesome MailChimp, I’ve integrated a newsletter sign-up into the footer of all pages of the site. I chose the footer for email subscriptions purposely – at this point in time my primary goal is not to solely increase my subscription base. I should also mention that my choice of Batchbook was swayed by its great integration with MailChimp’s API.

A better About page

Skills are one thing, but knowing who you’ll be doing business with is something else entirely. I’ve strengthened my original About page to highlight my history, showcase my social networks, and most importantly put a face to the name. I also chose to limit (and mask) my tweets on this page – I don’t feel my current opinions on football (I launched during the World Cup) and general mischief are fit for being splashed across a site that is attempting to drive business, no matter how non-transparent that might be.

More to come

It doesn’t stop there. Many more things are in the pipeline, including administering some Google AB test results, awaiting the results of my Crazyegg tests, getting more email templates up for folks to download, and making this site fully iPhone-ready using Responsive web design and more.

In the meantime however, I thought I’d announce a new side project that has finally seen the light of day. Introducing The Email Design Gallery at http://emaildesigngallery.com. I created this gallery as a showcase for all of the fantastic email designs out there, specifically as a way to help get the medium of email design more widely-recognized across the web community.

…besides simple design aesthetics, the EDG strives to underline the importance, creativity and hard work required for good email design by underlining the importance of standards-compliant code. With many web-based and desktop-based email clients to account for – all dramatically ranging in their rendering capabilities – email designers & coders are continually challenged to design for an often inhospitable medium.

With designs ranging from retail giants to boutique agencies – and everything in between – email design is slowly shedding the unfortunate title of web design’s ugly sibling and becoming a thriving design community onto itself – complete with its own set of guidelines, standards, pitfalls and best practices.

Go have a visit and browse the current entries (all hand-selected of course). If you feel you’ve got a kick-ass email design that ought to be there, feel free to tag the creative on Twitter with the hashtag ‘#theedg’ (or contact directly via http://twitter.com/theedg), or simply opt for the traditional way using the site’s submission form.

Hope to see you soon!

Having attended e-consultancy’s event on the ‘Future of Digital Marketing’ in June, if I’m being honest, it was the first time I’ve felt excited about digital marketing for a long time. Way back in February I attended the dire DMA show in Las Vegas, and subsequently wrote up a diatribe on why it and the industry as a whole seemed to be lacking in innovation. Thankfully, e-consultancy’s choice of speakers for their event seems to have gotten me back on the right track. This is part 1 of a 3 part series on the future of digital marketing and a recap of the event.

So what’s the future?

Not surprisingly, not one speaker on the day truly answered that question. All of them did however provide their thoughts and opinions on what they thought was at least coming onto the horizon – or what’s already here and hasn’t been properly utilized yet. While much of me wanted fundamentally new technologies to be unveiled (more on that later), the strongest recurring theme of the day was making the best use of the methods and tactics we digital marketers use today – just ‘better’. So the first take-away: if the basics of a digital marketing strategy at the moment include email marketing, pay-per-click, search engine optimization, referral and affiliate marketing and increasingly social media, then the digital marketing strategies of tomorrow will likely include the same. The innovation that represents the future of digital marketing is primarily in how each channel is represented, managed and utilized – focusing more on value to the end user and striving to maximize their experience beyond anything else.

Below are some choice extracts from the show that to me captured the essence of what the future of digital marketing actually will be, interspersed with my own opinions and thoughts or additions for good measure.

Get the basics right first

• Search is and will continue to act as the launch pad for most online experiences. The difference will be in the application, access and delivery of search results. With access to search increasingly varied by platform (mobile, web, API, socially-aided, etc.), search can become increasingly targeted and (as Google has shown us) will always be monetized.
• Localized search will become ubiquitous with Search. Users will increasingly use search to find local and offline results. In this respect, local search will become a microcosm of the SEM landscape we know today, with results targeted on such a granular basis that the competition between websites for conversions will take to the street.
• The consumer’s voice, since the advent of *shudder* ‘web 2′ technologies like social platforms, blogs and other dialogue enablers has been increasingly heard and will continue to lead the way marketers do business. This isn’t anything new, but recognition that as internet infrastructure grows, the need to listen to what your customers want – and don’t want – is beyond imperative. Barry Smith of SkyScanner summed it up by underlining the need to understand your landscape – get feedback, monitor, and respond accordingly.
• Social media will continue to proliferate and become increasingly synonymous with the web as a whole. Already we’re accustomed to checking our favourite social sites as part of our daily routine, but with innovations on the horizon like Google’s Wave plus socially-driven mobile apps and social search, most of the things done online by consumers and businesses alike will have a strong social component to them.
• The basic channels, and significantly email marketing, will become the foundation to a marketers kit. During a surprisingly open and telling presentation, Mark Kelleher – Head of Marketing Technology and Operations at the BBC – highlighted the BBC’s constant and continued use of email marketing as one of their primary interaction methods. 110 different newsletters totaling 30 million sent/month are delivered as timely, relevant and highly personalized communications thanks to advanced CRM techniques. It seems based on this that as a tactic, email marketing shows no signs of abating anytime soon.
• The web services we use today behind a monitor will tomorrow be integrated into more devices and channels. Integration and convergence as well as multi-platform access are indeed the next logical progression of the web, and marketers need to diversify their messages and technologies to reach the maximum number of users effectively.
• The underlining rule so far? Get the basics right before venturing into the ‘what’s upcoming’ waters. Focus on what you do already, but do it better, and always remember to maximize value to your end user, listen to them, and offer them what they want. Simple things to overlook like website conversion optimization, calls-to-action, A/B testing, platform/browser optimization, feedback user groups, localization and continual evolution need to be addressed before anything else. Build a solid foundation, and you’re setting yourself up for success.

Stay tuned for the next post: Getting to the fun stuff – the next level up in the future of digital marketing.

This past week I attended, albeit briefly, the TFM&A show in London. I normally love trade shows – the glitz, the glamour, the schwag – the buzz always gets me really inspired. This time it was all a bit different though. Maybe I’ve been getting used to the B2C arena in the last 1.5 years and become somewhat removed from the furore that is a B2B marketing tradeshow, but overall there was a strong theme I couldn’t shake – it’s all the same.

Turning down one aisle to another, every vendor’s booth might as well have been touting the same snake oil remedies to your problems. Unfortunately the snake oil was just a permutation or mutation on the basics: email marketing, SEO, CRM, viral marketing or the best/most potent of all – social media. The queue for the social media keynote alone was an unbelievable 4 wide, wrapping around booths and across aisles for at least 300 feet. Of course this is representative of the fact that social media has become an important tool in the marketer’s toolbox, and more importantly that our industry is booming, but is that it? For what it’s worth, I thought the exact same thing at the DMA show in Las Vegas in late 2008, and it seems to be a recurring theme or question of mine –what’s the next big thing in digital marketing and where’s it going? Why are the booths all touting the same old thing, or just a variation of it? Social media is our most recent revelation, but it’s a testament to how much like a fat kid on a smartie our industry has become. Are we so starved for newness that social media is the only thing that gets us out of bed in the morning?

We all know that marketing is all about getting to your target audience, and in the last 5 years it has become paramount to display the relevant messaging to your audience for the best yield. Digital marketing represents a medium that is extremely cost-effective, thanks in no small part to the internet revolution and how ubiquitous it is across all demographics and markets. As the web matures, behaviours mature, and products need to match those behaviours. In that respect, a part of marketing has always been inherently underhanded – we aggressively seek out and exploit new areas that show any sign of being lucrative. First it was the web in general (1.0), then it was communication channels like email, RSS, and now it’s all social (2.0). From a wider perspective, it just seems that marketing will always be moving 5 steps behind the general population, and playing catch-up to ‘fish where the fish are’.

It’s worth mentioning that not for one second am I inferring that I know any better than those many (clearly successful) service providers; nor do I know that the next big thing in digital marketing is X, Y or Z. I’m just saying that at this rate, digital marketing (and I’m not even touching traditional marketing here) is getting, for lack of a better word, predictable. As marketers, we have a basic set of tools, applications, systems and processes that we need to do our jobs effectively – a CRM for contact storage, an email platform for communicating, PPC for quality traffic, a web team for site optimization, and so on. But more and more I see these as assumed infrastructure rather than golden fleeces, and although vendors will always improve their offerings, they’ll always be offering effectively the same thing.

This post is sounding like I’m becoming jaded more than anything else, but I can’t help saying it: I can’t wait for a new paradigm – a fresh new way of approaching marketing (and our audiences) that stops us from being lemmings and instead lets us be part of the creation of products that promote themselves by addressing specific, real needs in a market. Until then, we seem destined to go buy the latest fishing rod by going to these ‘cutting edge, industry-leading’ tradeshows and getting swarmed by a sales crew who tout their ‘unique’ solution as the Holy Grail. Call me (very) sarcastic, but when one interested attendee actually asked a vendor ‘OK, so what are your USP’s’ I almost snorted. In the context of the show as a whole, I think I could have answered for him, although I don’t think my answer would have closed the deal.

Walked in at 8:30 am to find my desk as one massive present. This is the stuff of legend and lore.