Update on the Web Flyer

Sarah here!

Last week, we completed our e-newsletter masthead. What, you may ask, is that? That's the first thing you see when an e-newsletter is emailed to you: something consistent and visually appealing to start the newsletter.

This was yet another component of our class assignment, so we put one together to go along with everything else we have completed. As you can see, the header there is very similar to our blog header here. We wanted to keep these the same, so viewers could easily connect the newsletter and blog and know they are part of the same marketing scheme. We chose to keep the layout of this very simple so as to not overwhelm viewers. The design aspect was simple and very easy for us to put together, but nothing is ever easy, now is it?

When it came to putting the header in an email, we had all sorts of problems. Technological troubles seems to be a common theme with our project. Our first issue was finding an email provider that would allow us to send HTML-based emails. We have a Gmail account for this blog, and wanted to use that, but Gmail, unfortunately, does not allow sending HTML-based emails. We then tried using a Hotmail account, which will send HTML-based emails. When we attempted that, however, the formatting was incorrect. So after several attempts at tweaking the HTML coding, we gave up on Hotmail and decided to switch to a non-web-based email provider. This time we tried Thunderbird, Firefox's email client. This allows us to send HTML-based emails disguised as our Gmail account. Problem solved!

Luckily, now that we're beyond the technical issues, we are pretty much finished with the web flyer. Now our focus is on fine-tuning and tweaking the various components of our project, focusing primarily on the book trailer.

That's all for now; we'll keep you updated as we finish this project in time for finals week next week!

Signing off,
Sarah