Here’s a sneak preview of the design so far:

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I’m working on my first article and finalizing the blogazine’s design at the minute but you can follow me to find out when it launches.

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So, er, are you trying to cater for my wedding or my business? Be clear on your goals spammers!

Quick and Simple

I did a lot of quick slashing of the content, links and widgets from the old site, which were dragging the site down and making it look so so messy.  Simplicity is key for this site and I wanted to keep it at the bare minimum.  There’s still a few bugs here and there as I haven’t been over all my old blog posts to see how they’re holding up, but that should be fixed soon.

Follow Me on Twitter to find out first about the new blog project.

Here’s a collection of Monday morning tweets in my stream today. Don’t worry, Tuesday is just around the corner, then it’s mid-week, which is practically the weekend. :)

Follow @PaddyDonnelly on Twitter. (I don’t moan that much, only on Monday mornings)

One recent case of this is Debenhams, where they have appointed 6 customer assistants to interact with customers, giving them information, helping them out…via Twitter! What? Surely this is one of the times when you want to interact with a real life person, no?

It also opened up the floor for conversations like the following, which made me chuckle.

To be fair to the @Debenhamsretail staff, they saw the funny side, but should every company have a social media strategy or should they be focusing on improving their customer service as a whole?

I get quite a bit of email but there are some people out there who must get thousands every day and answering them would be near impossible. Here are 7 tips on to optimise your email when contacting someone busy, especially when asking for a favour.

1 - Make it personal

I recently got an email which started ‘Attn. Marketing Department‘. Big no-no. For whatever reason though, I didn’t regard it as spam straight away and I read on. It was a genuine email but someone had just been lazy and sent it to a load of people without even entering in a name.

Start it with ‘Hi Paddy’ at least. It’s so simple and common courtesy.  Definitely don’t send a mass email if you are trying to target people specifically. What I do is genuinely put a little effort into the email to make it personal to the specific recipient.  It may take longer than just mass emailing a bunch of people and changing the names, but it’s worth it.

2 - Take some interest in their work

Including a comment on something the recipient has done recently, ‘I really liked your recent blog post on bananas‘ for example, lets the recipient know that you are interested in what they do. If the email is personal to them then they’ll know it’s not just another marketing email sent to hundreds of people and will be more likely to respond. Make sure you do know a bit about the person though and your interest in genuine.  Don’t just visit their blog and say you liked their latest post.

3 - Don’t demand anything

The recipient doesn’t owe you anything. Why should they help you out? If you start demanding stuff from them you’ll not get anywhere. Just politely work your request into the email with phrases like ‘Any feedback you could give, would be great’, rather than. ‘Send your feedback to me within 24 hours’.  If they respond or help you out then treat it like a bonus.

4 - Don’t be apologetic

Starting off with ‘Sorry to bother you, but…’ may seem like you’re being considerate but what you’re really doing is putting a negative thought in their head from the start. Now, while they are reading your email, the thought of being bothered is in the back of their mind and this will pull down the appeal of your email.

5 - Keep it short and to the point

While I cringe when someone mentions the K.I.S.S. principle, it is very applicable in most situations, especially with regards to emails.  If your recipient gets countless emails every day, then the sight of opening a complete essay will force many to move on without reading. There’s nothing wrong with keeping it short and concise.  Your message will be a lot clearer within one, maximum two, paragraphs.  If you can’t sum your idea up in one paragraph then it’s too convoluted and uninteresting to the majority of people.

6 - Everyone loves humour

You wade through 100 email requests, one of them is quirky and funny while 99 are regular and boring. Which one will you remember? Obviously don’t try to be Tommy Cooper and fill the email with one liners, but just keep in mind that a little bit of humour can go a long way and strike a chord with the recipient.

7 - Say Thank You!

One of the least used and most effective two words, Thank you.  Something as simple as firing back a ‘Thanks for that, I really appreciate it’ email will earn you mega brownie points.  There’s nothing I appreciate more than receiving a thank you note, email, phone call and you can bet that even the most high profile people are the same.

What if you didn’t get the desired result though? What if they said no to your request? Thank them for their time anyway and you never know, it might be enough to keep you in their mind for next time.

Next Time

I’ll be flipping this post and suggesting some ‘Tips for answering emails‘ next time so Follow me on Twitter and subscribe to the RSS feed so as not to miss out.

Did I miss anything?

Do you structure your emails in a different way when contacting people? Do you have any other tips to suggest?

Follow me on Twitter to be the first to know about future creations.

Sure you can make it look so much prettier in Photoshop with your drop shadows and gradients but it will suffer from a lack of foundation.  Websites (and I’m talking about those special ones we all wish we had made) have to have a bit of soul, a bit of madness, a bit of Zig A Zig Ah as a certain quintette of ladies once sang about.

This can only come from spending the time pre-computer and getting your HB out. So without further ado, here’s a small sample of what I’ve been sketching for the past wee while.

The Moleskine

I try to always carry a Moleskine about with me so I can jot down ideas for blog posts, layouts, logos or try my best at sketching the variety of colourful characters on Belgium’s buses. Seriously getting the bus is like a free ticket to the zoo some days. Anyway, here’s the kinda thing I get up to.

The idea to use a few different animals as ‘mascots’ came from some doodles.  I kept drawing penguins and sheep attached to a rocket ship.  Don’t ask me why but there is something cool about attaching rockets to things. I have since found out that Pepsi also appreciates the attractiveness of rockets and small flightless animals.

One thing that frustrates me about my current site and many others is that it’s so hard to find anything.  I could just see in my head these four animals representing the categories of my site - Blog, Projects, Interviews and Things I See (photos, twitter, delicious etc). I knew the penguin on the rocket had to be one of them, but I’m still working on another 3 which will tickle my creativity and quirkyness.  I’m think the Narwhal has to be in there too. How many people don’t know about Narwhals?! They are like unicorn whales!

You see what I’m talking about with the bit of madness? I just have this obsession with these little characters, which all stemmed from sketching in my Moleskine and they are a driving force behind this new site.

Proper sketches

After you have a collection of these fuzzy ideas roaming about on scraps of paper here and there, collect them all together and start making the beginnings of your proper sketches.

Here’s the way it’s in my head, or as close as I can represent on paper. It’s not easy to project what’s in your mind’s eye onto a piece of paper although it gets easier the more you do it.

The Homepage

I forsee a tabbed structure but not like the usual, overused, tired method.  I’m talking about big ass tabs, with these four charismatic animals standing guard on the homepage

Quirky add ons

There’s a lot of quirky little things I’ve tinkered with and want to include on the site.  I don’t have enough hidden things on this current site and it annoys me.

Little things like the contact page, which is a usually an afterthought, I want to dedicate some serious time to developing, including the language used, method of contact available, images, everything. I can see a photo of myself sitting at my laptop pointing at the message field of the contact form saying that I’m ready to reply.  Little touches like that will encourage people to get in contact faster.

Textures

Wanting to move further away from ‘web 2.0′ but still retain the principles, I want to use more textures in my sites.  This is something I haven’t done much with in the past but I have some ideas on using them to create some sort of depth. We’ll see if it works out.

In the end one of the prime goals of this new site is to make it so so so much easier to find my stuff, including a better search, featured posts, better categories and many other little tricks. I have a plethora of other sketches and ideas but I’ll save some surprises for next time.

Next stage

So I want to see you back here checking out the next stage: ‘Wireframing’. Follow me on Twitter and you’ll know when I know!

I’ve checked my flood of emails and have a load of posts planned for the next while, including the next step in my Live Creation Process.

Follow Me on Twitter and subscribe to my RSS feed to find out first.

Chat soon!