I ran across this blog post today from Campaign Monitor about how Microsoft is taking email design back 5 years. Microsoft Outlook 2007 was released yesterday as part of Microsoft Office 2007, which is being released at the same time as Windows Vista, Microsoft’s new operating system.

According to the blog post, Outlook is going from using the Internet Explorer rendering engine to using the Microsoft Word rendering engine to display e-mails. The reasoning behind this is that Outlook uses Word to compose e-mails. Using Word to display e-mails ensures that the e-mail will look the same across all versions of Outlook 2007. Smart, huh?

Calling this colossal stupidity on Microsoft’s part is an understatement. Although it doesn’t surprise me in the least. Microsoft is not known for their support of standards. This genius move ensures that using CSS based layout for e-mail design will make it break in Outlook 2007 due to lack of support for any CSS except inline styles.

If you are an e-mail designer, you need to read the article to find out how this will affect you. In short, it looks like table based layout will be the way to go to ensure your e-mail will display properly in Outlook 2007.

After thinking about it though, it may not be as bad as it seems, for a while anyway. Most users of Microsoft Office will not upgrade right away. Those that do may not even use Outlook. I don’t use it, but I do use Office. The downside is that Microsoft has ensured that this will continue for years to come. Because when people do eventually upgrade, they will get Office 2007, even if it takes years.

This is a paid review for Shoemoney’s blog. I have to say that I am a big fan of Shoemoney, aka Jeremy Schoemaker. So I was surpsrised when I saw that he had asked for a paid review on my site. I’m not sure what Shoemoney is up to here, but I’m guessing that he is testing out paid blog review services somehow. Shoemoney, I would have done this one for free buddy, so here goes.

I’m not sure where I first heard of Shoemoney, but I know I started reading his blog sometime last year. Now, I read it everyday at the top of my list (knocking off SEOmoz, by the way, sorry Rand.) I think it’s because he likes talking about making money online, and that is something I am really interested in right now. Plus, he likes to mix a lot of humor in his writing. He also likes to write about business and making money in general. I guess you could say I am really trying to take his advice and put it into practice. I started using Google Adwords as well as Yahoo and MSN search advertising based on Shoemoney’s advice. I also have looked into affilate marketing, but I learned I suck at it so I have to learn a lot more before I jump into it and build more traffic first.

I also love Shoemoney’s podcast on Webmaster Radio. I listen to it every week and even went back and listened to a lot of the past shows. He seems to have the best and most interesting guests. The podcasts are definitely worth your time. I was dissappointed when he said his contract would be up soon. I will miss it but I understand it’s stressful, and you have to try new things and then move on.

If you are new to Shoemoney, I recommend going back and reading what he has to say. There is great content in the archives of his web site. Seriously, you can learn a lot about making money on the web. Late last year, I went back and read all of his posts for 2006 to catch up and to learn as much as possible.

Well, I probably sound like a geek sitting here gushing about Shoemoney. But I really do believe what he says, and that if you work hard like he does, you can really make good things happen for yourself. I think that is what Shoemoney is about overall. Also, Jeremy if you would leave a comment here, that would be pretty cool. Maybe you could let us know why you are paying for blog reviews, when Lord knows you have tons of links already. Peace.

I haven’t spent a lot of time on this blog since I launched it. I think there are only 42 posts here right now. I guess that is because I’m not really doing any SEO right now. Most of what I do involves putting together web sites for the company I work for. Part of that includes things most people would consider SEO, but I’m not really actively doing it.

I am actively doing SEM, but for my own stuff. So I guess that counts. I do read many SEO blogs everyday, so I keep track of what is going on. I think the SEO world is changing though. SEO has become more about marketing and less about keyword placement and things like that. I think that is a good thing. You have to look at the overall picture, and not just one part of it.

Anyway, since I signed up for the Review Me service, all of my posts have been paid reviews. I like that I can make money through this site, but I don’t want it to become a collection of paid reviews. That said, I have another one to write. Shoemoney is paying for a review on my site, and I would have done that one for free. So next up is a post about Shoemoney.

Wow, 2 posts in a row about validation. This post is about CSS validation because I decided to break the last post into 2 parts. Yesterday, I was having difficulty working on a site I did not build. So, I decided to run the CSS through a validating tool to see if there were any problems.

Not surprisingly, there were some. What was surprising is that using different validation tools gave me different answers. First, I ran my code through this tool by the W3C for CSS Validation. This report indicated I had 3 errors in my code and gave me 7 warnings.

Then, I ran my code through this tool also by the W3C for CSS Validation, although technically it is for any markup validation. This report only indacted one error. But, it did allow me more options for checking the CSS.

After comparing the 2 validators rather briefly and unscientifically, I think you are better off using a tool specific for CSS validation, like the first one. You will more than likely get better results that way.

This a quick post about validating the code on your web site because I happened to be thinking about it today. Usually, validation is one of the first things I check when something breaks on a site. Running your site through a validator is a good way to spot errors in your code quickly.

Although I support standards and build sites based on them, I am pretty lazy about vaildation. I have the HTML Validator plugin installed in Firefox. Usually, all I do is check for the green checkmark there, and I am good to go. I recommend doing more than that though and making sure you run your entire site through a validator at least once before you launch. However, having the HTML Validator installed will help you check your code for errors on the fly, and save you time in the long run.

If you are a designer and you haven’t heard of script.aculo.us, surely you have heard of Ajax. Even so, you may be surprised to learn that script.aculo.us and Ajax are not the same thing.

I have heard of both Ajax and script.aculo.us, but I thought that they were the same thing. I have seen both of them in use on sites that Mediapulse designed, but I have never used them myself. Well, once I learned recently that script.aculo.us is not Ajax and it is very easy to use, I decided to give it a try on a site that I am working on.

It turns out it is very easy to implement some cool looking effects with script.aculo.us. If you don’t believe me, take a look at 4 easy steps to script.aculo.us, and then take a look at the effects you can do with script.aculo.us.

The effect I found the most practical so far is the “toggle” effect. The toggle effect allows you to hide and reveal an object by clicking the object. You can also combine the toggle effect with any of the other visual effects. The visual effect I find the most practical for this is the “blind up” and “blind down” effect. You can even modify settings on these effects, like speed of movement.

In using these effects though, I have some tips to help you get the best performance out of these effects for your users. For the toggle effect, you can make a div clickable to reveal or hide another div on the page. I learned that by doing this, you do not need to add a link because the div itself acts as the button. The only problem is that because it is not actually a link, the cursor will not change to a hand when you mouse over it, so the user may not automatically recognize that it is clickable.

You can solve this problem through CSS. There is a CSS property, called “cursor,” you can set to “pointer” for any object. This means that whenever the user mouses over that object, the cursor turns to a hand, and lets the user know that object is clickable.

Now you have an object that looks and acts like a link and when clicked can reveal another object on the page with cool motion or animated effects. I recommend not waiting, like I did, and trying out script.aculo.us effects on your sites today! I don’t think you will be dissappointed.

I highly recommend adding sIFR to your web site, if it is appropriate. I have to admit for a long time I didn’t like it. But, sometimes adding nice looking typography to your site can really make it pop in a way that you can only do with Flash or images. So, the more I use sIFR, the more I like it, and the more I use it, the more I understand how it works. If you don’t know what sIFR is or what it does, please check out Mike Davidson’s sIFR site.

sIFR works by using Javascript and the Flash player to replace headlines in your web page with nicely styled fonts in Flash. If you are a novice to sIFR, there are certain tricks to using it that can greatly enhance your implementation. I won’t go into all of them here, but I will talk about turning off your underlying headlines in sIFR.

When you have sIFR installed on your site, sometimes you tend to notice the unstyled underlying text show up briefly before being replaced by Flash. If you have this problem, you will want to eliminate it to get the best user experience possible. It has a kind of jarring effect when you see the font change suddenly like that, so it is best to avoid it.

The creators have provided a way to turn this off so that you will only see the Flash fonts load when the page loads. You can do this by adding a stylesheet to your header called “sIFR-screen.css.” If you do this, then your headlines should not show by default. This works by creating default styles for your headlines with the class “.sIFR-hasFlash.” All headlines are then set to “hidden” so they will not be displayed if you have javascript and Flash 7 installed. The genius is that is you don’t have javascript or Flash 7 running, the normal unstyled headlines will still be visible.

However, you may want to modify the code if you are only replacing a certain group of headlines, and not all of them at once. You can do this by adding an id to your headers and then adding the id to the header style in your sIFR stylesheet.

I need to warn you here, not to remove the “hasFlash” class from your header styles. If you do this, the headlines will not show up when javascript is not running or you have a version lower than Flash 7. This may be rare, but you can modify the sIFR script to work only with Flash 8, like I did here. I made this mistake, which is how I know you need it.

So in closing, make sure you turn off the underlying headlines when using sIFR. Also, be sure to test your work with Javascript turned off, to make sure those users who have javascript turned off or don’t have the right Flash player can still see your headlines.

Today, we were informed by a client that one of the sites we had been working on was not working properly. When the client went to the site, they could see the site, but it was behind a transparent white screen. We had no information on what platform or browser the client was using, but I assumed it was a compatibility issue with the Flash player.

On this particular site, it was using SlideShowPro, UFO and sIFR, all on the home page. Chris noticed that one of the slideshows was only compatible with Flash version 8. He thought if we downgraded it to 7, that would solve the issue. I agreed, but I wanted to test it first to see if we could reproduce the problem. I thought that this would help us deal with Flash player compatibility issues in the future.

I decided to look for a way to test different versions of the Flash plugin. I found the archived Flash player download page on Adobe’s web site. I recommend bookmarking this page. You will need to download these plugins if you want to test different Flash player versions in your browsers. I had a problem though. I could only get the players to install in Firefox. I couldn’t install any of those plugins in Internet Explorer.

So I installed Flash player version 7 in Firefox. When I viewed the site, it was obvious that was causing the problem. Don’t ask me how the client had Flash player version 7 still on their browser. That seems to be about par for the course around here. Anyway, downgrading the slideshow to version 7 fixed the problem, and the site is now compatible with Flash 7. Voila!

In researching this problem though, I came across another neat little tool, called Plugin Switcher, that I recommend you try out. Right now, it is only compatible with Windows. But, it allowed me to install as many versions of the Flash plugin as I wanted and switch between them on the fly.

Plugin Switcher claims to let you switch between Active X plugins also but I could not activate that feature. As a result, it only worked in Firefox for me, however it did that perfectly. There is a free version and a paid version. I only tried the free version. I contacted the developer to find out how much the full version is since most of the site is in German. If I ever try out the full version, I will post again, and let you know what I think.

I love wordpress, but one of the things it lacks is the ability to add a contact form. As a result, I have been looking for a way to easily add a contact form to wordpress. Today, I ran across this contact form plugin that seemed to be what I have been looking for.

It was created by Mike Cherim and Mike Jolley. It was a snap to install, and once I installed it, it works great. It requires a minimum of setup, and you will have a secure contact form running in no time at all. This is the wordpress contact form plugin you’ve been looking for.

It is secure in that it adds a CAPTCHA which prevents automated submissions to help combat spam. I recommend installing this today if you require this functionality on your blog. I am installing this on all of my sites that use wordpress. Dowload the plugin here and check out my contact form here.

Now if I can find a stats plugin for wordpress that would really rock!

We have been working on a site for Celebrity Choppers for the past month, which launched yesterday. Celebrity Choppers is currently a TV show without a home. The synopsis is a group of guys from Tennessee build custom chopper motorcycles for celebrities.

I am really excited about this site and really enjoyed working on it. It was designed by our Creative Director, Chris Kosman. I did all the CSS layout and design. You can view it at http://www.celebritychoppers.net/. This is a great looking site which we are really proud of.