Anna Geeroms's Blog Posts

I'm back!

A year ago today, on a sunny September afternoon, my two amazing babies, Azalea and Ryan, were born at 31 weeks and 3 days gestation.  There is a higher risk of premature labour with twins, but I thought I was being cautious, planning to finish up work at the end of 32 weeks.  However, my body had other plans and those babies wanted out! 

Born after an hour and 39 minute natural birth, both babies were small (4 lbs and 3 lbs 6 ounces) but vigorous.  They spent 38 days at the NICU growing bigger so that we could take them home. 

When we brought them home the really hard work began.  Sleepless days and nights spent feeding, changing and clothing them… it was about 11 months until we had a moment to breath.  Through it all, our family was amazing, spending nearly 5 days a week helping us take care of our growing babes.  And they have grown into two amazing little people.

Multi-Step vs. Single Page Checkout

Have you ever tried to purchase something off the internet and been presented with a long tabbed, multi-step checkout?  You think to yourself "what am I getting myself into?"  You have no idea what they might ask in future parts of the form and so you hesitate before committing to buy something.

Alternately, have you come to the checkout page and it is 7 km long? So long, your hand gets tired of scrolling!

[no visual displayed here because it would be too long for this page]

Either way, you are tempted to abandon your cart and get out of there!

Why the unsubscribes?

It takes quite a bit of time and energy to create an email newsletter.  Writing the stories, putting the newsletter together, assembling and formatting the images, proofing the newsletter, and managing the distribution lists--the list of To Do's makes for quite a time investment. 

And then people unsubscribe! Each unsubscribe can feel like a total rejection.  And with broken heart you'll do the play-by-play in your brain, wondering what made them jump ship.  Was the newsletter uninteresting, not a suitable topic, riddled with errors? It's easy to jump to the conclusion that the content or presentation are at fault.

Vertical Response Release New Editor

Vertical Response, an online newsletter software, recently released an update to their editor.  WOW!  What an improvement.

The old editor, used for editing custom HTML templates was pretty picky.  It reminded me of Microsoft Word, in that you might press return once and get a huge gaping hole in your layout. Or press backspace once and the entire design would disappear. Undo was a most used feature.  And often the remedy was to extract the source and fix things up in Dreamweaver, combing through line by line.

That said, I've always liked Vertical Response because I like the management interface, including the list manager, and after gaining enormous popularity, they are still offering their service FREE to nonprofits, which is awesome for many of our clients.

Drupal Six Raised Eyebrow Online Help Manual Really Helps!

As of Tuesday, with each new Drupal 6 website we build, we will be providing access to an online manual. Like our paper manual, the online manual describes the basic functions of Drupal in easy to understand language and has customized client-specific content. But the new format also has many new benefits.

Book Module

The online manual uses the Drupal book module, which is a great because the book module lends to organizing things… like a book. The book module automatically creates a listing of the child entries, like a table of contents. You can order the child pages in any way you choose. I also like the book module because is has a printer-friendly version of each page. It does a really nice job of stripping out the unnecessary stuff and optimizing the content for printing, so you don’t get pages broken in half or extra white pages when you print.

Information in a New Dimension