In Mac Mail:

1. Create a new signature. Make it simple: it doesn’t matter.  This is going to create a file in the system folder that we are going to overwrite in a minute.

2. If you’re like me, you’ve got 20 email addresses and tons of signatures.  Go locate the sig you just created.  It’s located in users>your_user_name>library>mail>signatures.  Look for the one with the most recent time stamp — that’ll be the one you just created.  Double-click on it to verify (it’ll open in Safari).  When you are sure it’s the one you just created, label it red so you can find it easily next time.

In an html editor, like DreamWeaver:

1. Create a cool, sensible footer with graphics, formatting.  You know, your dream footer. Optimize your graphics.  Remember, this’ll be an e-mail.  Think small.  Smaller the better. Simple is better too.  Hard-code fonts, sizes and colors in html. Sure, you can use in-line css, but why? Simple, simple, simple.  What we are after here is something bulletproof. The fewer fail points, the better. Remember:  this is an email signature! Upload your graphics to a web server, and use absolute links in the footer code. Obviously relative links will get lost. Test the code in a browser to make sure it looks good, works and that everything is resolving.

2. When you’re satisfied you’ve got clean code, open the code in Safari. It has to be Safari. We are going to overwrite the web archive you created in step one with a web archive full of html.  Sort of “tricking” Mac Mail in to believing our new sig is their old sig. Once open, hit “save as.” You are going to save this safari file as a “web archive,” and you are going to overwrite the file we labelled in red just above.

Once that’s done, your bullet-proof signature is ready to go. You may have to quit Mail to get it to pick up the new sig. Voila! Beautiful!

So today we’re continuing to flesh-out the menus, clean up some of the place-holder graphics and added some back-end functionality to the site.

Menu’s

Ordinarily we’ll have a very clear menu-tree built before your site goes it to construction.  We’ll have spend some time with you mapping out the functionality sets of your site, and we’ll have a good blue print to go off of.  For our own site, we’re not nearly that organized! (You know the story of the cobbler’s children!) So we’re adding menus — changing our minds — deleting menu’s as we go.  Not a very efficient workflow, but that’s one of the great things about WordPress.  It’s so easy to change the menu’s without consequence. Very forgiving. For your own site, it’s good to know you are not backing yourself into a corner by publishing your menu. Nothing’s set in stone: if you don’t like it, change it.  For ourselves, we just added “Express University” and “Communities” to the top menu: our larger vision is to have on-going classes for Express Members to learn more about their marketing tools and how to use them. We’re calling this “Express University.” And our intention is to have Express Communities like this one all over the country. But we’re still new and Greater Austin is our first community since this is our home. So for a while anyway, we’re only go to have one community listed here. Now we still haven’t added content to these areas: that’ll come later.

Clean-up Graphics

At this point, we have two affiliate partners at Express: Constant Contact and GoDaddy.  Constant Contact provides excellent e-newsletter technology and list creation/management, while GoDaddy is our preferred domain name and hosting provider.  By the way, every day we come across businesses that are still paying $50+ for domain registration. A new .com should NOT ever cost more than $12. Remember that hosting and domain registration have become “commodities.” They are now like “electricity.” It just works, and where you get it from is relatively unimportant. What we search for in a provider is excellent telephone customer service, stability and good value. And we haven’t found anyone better at all three of those things than GoDaddy.

We’re proud of the relationships we have with our partners, so to showcase them, we’ve placed their logos in the “footer” of each page.  That way they’ll show up on every page.  We’re going to recommend you do this with your partners/affiliates, too.  We call this collection of logos in the footer the “wall of honor.” Think of it like the wall of a doctor’s office, with all the diplomas and credentials on display. These have the job of building comfort and trust with your customer. Now — we had to “clean” these graphics up a bit, because our site has a grey background.  Many websites have a white background — so it wouldn’t have mattered that some of the graphics were also on white — but it matters on our site, and if we didn’t change them, the graphics  would look “blocky” against the grey background.  So we dropped out the backgrounds and made them transparent.  Now the graphics look natural against the sites’ grey background.  Only a few graphic formats support “transparencies,” so when we created these particular graphics, we saved them as .png’s.  Png’s and gif’s support “nothing” as a graphic background, whereas jpgs will turn “nothing” into white.  Again, had the site’s background been white, then we might not have cared so much. But even then there’s a good argument for cleaning up the graphics: You see, another one of the great things about WordPress is that it is very easy to change templates. Because the content is database driven, you can swap “templates” out when you tire of your existing layout.  This is a HUGE benefit. A big time and money saver. So if you take the time now to prepare your graphics like we just did, you’ll be able to choose a new template one day with a non-white background and your graphics will still look great.  So a little bit of extra work now gives you more choice (and less work!) later.

Added Functionality

Add This:  You may have noticed the orange “+” signs through each page and post.  This is a widget called “Add this.” What’s cool about it is that if you read something you like, it’s very easy to “share” it with friends. Simply hover over the “+” icon, and you’ll get a choice of media to share with.  Let’s say you want to share something with your facebook friends.  You’d hover over the “+,” click the facebook icon.  If you’re already logged on to facebook you are done.  It’ll show up on your wall.  If you are not logged it, it’ll ask you to log in, and then it’ll post it.  And it’ll do that for a TON of different media. We want to make it easy for our viewers to “do something” with our site.  Statistically, we know that the more steps we have for people to interact with our content, the less likely they will be to do it.  So the “Add This” widget is a tool for reducing the number of steps involved.  It’s a great widget, and one that we recommend for all our members.

Google Analytics: One cool plugin we added that you cannot see is the Google Analytics widget.  It’s running behind the scenes, and tells us what kind of traffic our site it generating.  To use it, we created a Google account for the site.  Like most plug-ins, it’s free.  The site reports metrics to google, who keeps it and organizes it for you.  And in the admin dashboard, you’ll get a quick overview of what’s going on: number of visitors, top referring sites, etc. Great stuff.  Another “must have” plug-in we recommend to all our members.

Newest Posts: Super simple widget aggregates the newest “posts” (as opposed to “pages”) and puts them all in one easy-to-find place.  “Posts” are actually “blogs,” and have a different function than “pages.” Because it’s a widget, it’ll appear in the sidebar of every page.  This took about 15 seconds to put together.  Word Press ROCKS!

But Express is about demystifying the internet, and empowering small business to master the internet.  So in that spirit, we’re building this site live, so you can see it come together.  As we add to it, we’ll post what we did and why at this location, so you can participate with the process.

So — check by here frequently and watch it come together!