Life Online
There's a lot of details to deal with concerning life on the web. If you or your business depends on consistent quality concerning your web presence, you may want to focus on two fundamentals:
- Privacy -If you plan on using your email address as a mass communication vehicle then please protect your recipients privacy!!! Please note the existence of the BCC field in the header section of your email client. BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy. Blind carbon copy exists for a very noble purpose; to send your message to anyone you choose to and then send a digital 'carbon copy' to others without the TO recipient knowing it. (Henceforth the "blind" in blind carbon copy!) Huh? Here's an example. I want to send a message to my friends at church. Emphasis has been added to the words 'my friends' in hopes of conveying the fact that although these friendly people are my friends, they may not be your friends and therefore may not want you to have their email address. If they did want you to have their email address, they would have given it to you personally. Make sense? So I simply create a new email message and place my own email address in the TO line. I then include, my mailing list's email addresses in the BCC field and then proceed with sending the message. It's that simple and you'll never again have to worry about big guys wearing dark suits and carrying baseball bats paying you a visit at 2:00 am because you distributed their bosses' email address to email harvesting bots and 2 million of your closest friends.
- Image Quality - If you are placing your images online, I would expect you to be naturally concerned about bandwidth (What is that? Well, Picture in your mind how your water bill works and apply that to how much data is transferred when someone visits the folder where all your site files are kept and downloads them to their computer to 'visit your site'. Someone is paying for this transfer of data and if you have a serious web presence then that someone is you!) The size of the images on your page can be controlled by using Photoshop or Fireworks. Use the "Save for web" feature to reduce the size of the image. Don't notice a difference after you've run this feature? The rest of us do and appreciate the additional step. You will drastically cut down on loading time of pages by learning about this feature of Adobe products. (See screenshot below. Notice the difference in size of file between images "saved for web" and images simply saved and placed on the web.)
