One of the unavoidable complications with your email marketing newsletter is that you cannot fully control the font in which it is displayed. The email reader, or the browser, that your customer uses is not guaranteed to use the font you have so diligently selected for your newsletter. This is just as true for your carefully crafted HTML email, or your web site – i.e. the font may not be available (loaded) on your customers PC. Obviously, the alternative for your newsletter is to send it as a PDF document attached to a covering email; but that’s one extra click required of your time-starved customer …

So what’s available to ensure that your extensively researched look&feel, your brand, is consistent between your website, your newsletters, your HTML emails, and your ‘paper’ publications? You could depend on the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) font-family property (see font family, or w3school.com, or for a more general introduction: sitepoint), alternatively you might consider Google Fonts!

I’m currently mentoring a charity that require a non-standard layout for their new information newsletter. We’ve reviewed Litmus: Email client market share, and have compromised, for their first issue, on a standard font. They are non-profit Salesforce user, using Vertical Response as their email marketing App. (incidentally you don’t need to be a Salesforce user to use Vertical Response, you can use it as a standalone application … this is well worth considering if you’re a charity). However, for subsequent newsletters we’ll be using Google Fonts.

So what are Google Fonts? Google Fonts are “… high-quality web fonts that you can include in your pages …” With simple code (the Google Fonts API) in the HTML of your newsletter you’ll have significantly more control over the fonts your customer will view your newsletter in. Essentially, Google Fonts are downloaded from the Google Font Server when the newsletter is first read (technically: the fonts are saved in the email/browser cache so subsequent newsletters will be quicker … ).

Some example Google Fonts and their effects (Yes! Google Fonts work in WordPress!):

This is Cardo!

This is Tangerine!

This is Tangerine, with shadow!

To preview the currently available Google Fonts try here … So, no excuse now; move your Fonts to the Cloud!

Need more information? Do contact me.

The book publisher Packt (pronounced Packed) have just announced “… that WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards.” This is the first time WordPress has won this Award.

Drupal, another CMS that I support, won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. For this category there was a very close contest between the top three: Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla!

Whilst I would expect Drupal to be among the top three in this category, Wordress is in the top five for the first time. “The fact that it was outranked by Drupal by a very slight margin indicates how popular it has become with users as well as developers over the past year.”

Also see my earlier post on WordPress …

I use it so I must recommend it.  But, actually I do think it is the best of breed platform for Blogging, and probably the most popular blogging platform.

Now a Blog is your Real Estate,  your property that is fixed in location, on the web.  Your blog’s content is not like your content in LinkedIn, Facebook, or even Twitter – for it’s accessible by search engines, and not closed like those other forms of social media – you don’t have to login to view the full content.  So to be fully visible on the web you must have a Blog, and your choice of Blogging platform is critical.

So, here once you’ve got WordPress installed, are two links to get you started.  From Lifehacker (tag line:  Tips and downloads for getting things done) is The Beginner’s Guide to Tricking Out Your WordPress Blog, and from Mark Ghosh’s WeblogToolsCollection Schwag is WordPress for Beginners.

Of course, you must then install the All in One SEO Pack (SEO: search engine optimization) for a properly “executed SEO techniques will bring your website increased exposure, recognition, and will generate free traffic“, and Google XML Sitemaps a plugin that generates a XML-Sitemap of your blog that supports “Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.”

Then it’s just a matter of regularly generating interesting content, and “they will come” … easy – in’it.