125Cards Leap-Year Special

I’ve decided to run a little competition/give-away type thing over on 125Cards.com. Prizes include: A custom 125×125 design and 1 month free advertising on 125Cards.com 1000 Entrecard points to spend …

Read more

My Powerbook G4 came home!

This has to be one of the weirdest things that has ever happened to me.

powerbookg4Last year I spent two months travelling around Europe in my VW Camper, I had actually planned to be away for four months, but while visiting Pisa in Italy my camper van was broken into and everything was stolen – cloths, food, books, dirty washing and my trusty PowerBook G4, all gone to some thieving ….

Anger eventual turned to frustration as all the things stolen where mealy materialistic and could be replaced, but one thing that frustrated me the most was that my laptop had all my holiday photos on, and although I could revisit the places and take more pictures, the mood and atmosphere would never be recaptured.

So I set about asking for it back, not necessarily my laptop, but the pictures that were on it. I tried a kind of laws of attraction thing, but without all the fuss of the secret (I personally don’t like that film/book). I imagined myself looking at the pictures and even showing them to my family and friends. Then…

Read more

Ugly Squeeze Pages and Design

The Landing Page or Squeeze Page as it is more commonly know, is seen by some as the most important part of any opt-in email or affiliate driven website.

uglesqueezepagesA typically Squeeze Page tries to entice its “target” audience with marketing and copywriting techniques such as headlines, bullet points, teaser copy, deadlines and testimonials. All of which are generally so well researched that they can take the author days and several attempts to perfect.

But something that I just can’t fathom out, is why such a well written bit of marketing tends to have to look so aesthetically unpleasing to the eye. I have found myself on several occasion just giving up trying to read such a page as the design is so appalling.

The classic example generally has a blue or grey background with either a white of light yellow text area. The text for some god-awful reason seem to usually be Courier – can anybody tell me Why? And with alleged meaningful words and phrases picked out in a collection of insipid Red, Yellow or Blue bold text makes the whole thing unbearable.

Read more