I believe the title of the is post from the lines and colors blog, How Not to Display Your Artwork on the Web, pretty much says it all. I’ve seen so many artists make the next to last mistake it’s not even funny….

Most importantly, make sure the images themselves are too small to really convey any feeling for your work. Remember - all visitors to your portfolio site are malicious parasitic thieves, out to steal your precious artwork and print it on millions of knock-off T-shirts in China! Don’t give them anything that makes your work look good enough to steal!! Better yet, keep your work safe by not putting it on the web at all! If your work is in print, you need to write your senators and demand they outlaw inexpensive scanners, which can actually be used to grab a high-resolution, printable image of your art. Now that I think of it, it’s better to prevent your work from appearing in print too. Keep it at home in a drawer so no one can see it but you!

Go check out the full post here. Sorry to admit that I’ve been guilty of one or two of these things
Thanks to the Drawn! blog for finding this link.

Take out your artist’s statement and see if you can find the following words…

• really
• very
• extremely
• literally
• actually

If you find them it may be time for a rewrite, Alyson Stanfield from the Art Biz Blog posted an excerpt from publicity expert, Marcia Yudkin’s weekly newsletter, The Marketing Minute. According to Marcia Yudkin, in any marketing piece you should use adverbs sparingly…if a word doesn’t add to your point or even worse…mucks it up…eliminate it.

Ouch…I think I just found a couple in my artist statement.

Check out the rest of Alyson’s post here.

You can also sign up for Marcia Yudkin’s Marketing Minute here.

Well, the folks at the Common Craft web site has done it again. They’ve followed up their cool video, RSS in Plain English, with a second video that explains all about wikis….in plain english.

Well talk about serendipity! Just hours after I posted about how to avoid strange text symbols in your HTML pages…an article in the latest Marketing Sherpa newsletter talks about a study that reveals that 53% of email subject lines are broken because of the funkedfied symbols you get when cutting and pasting text typed in Microsoft Word into email systems. So the same garble gremlins that can plague HTML pages can also mess up your email too.

The 17-page report (PDF) is freely available on the Marketing Sherpa web site until June 19th. It’s a fairly quick read and it outlines what causes the problem and how to fix it. The key takeaways are:

1. Do not copy email subject lines and messages from Microsoft Word into your email delivery system.

2. Write out your subject line in your email editor to ensure that there’s no hidden code in the subject line.

3. Test, test, and test your email mailings before you send out your newsletter or ezine. And be sure to test what it looks like on different types of email programs. Each program treats text a bit differently….because everything being the same is just too easy.

Check out the Marketing Sherpa article here:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30008+

Download the report (until June 19) here:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/pivotalveracity/study.html

Bottom line…don’t cut and paste directly from Microsoft Word…whether you’re writing copy for your web site or copy for your email newsletter. Remember…plain text editors are your friend!

Have you ever cut and paste some text into your web page through your WYSIWIG web tool or software program only to find later that there’s some weird and funky formatting or symbols in the text? No it’s not your imagination…word processing programs like Microsoft Word sometimes put hidden code in your text…especially if you’re using formatting like bold, italics, or underlining. If your copy has special symbols like em dashes, ellipses, tildes, accent marks, and copyright symbols, those symbols won’t translate straight to HTML either. Those require use of special ASCII codes in order to show up correctly in your HTML page. The same thing can also happen if you’re cutting and pasting text your web browser as well.

The best way to avoid this problem is before you cut and paste your copy into your web page, is to save your Word document as Text Only (.txt). Then you can open up that text file and cut and paste your text directly in your web page. If you don’t feel like saving the whole document as text, but only have a small portion of the text you wish to cut and paste, you can use Notepad. Simply cut and paste that section of text into an empty Notepad file, then copy and paste that text from your Notepad file into your web page. Notepad is included on all version of Windows…if you’re a Mac user, I suggest you use a text editor like BBEdit or TextEdit as part of your web design toolkit.