What do you do when that nice-looking email is from an organization that's almost always helpful to you? If you're like most people, you take a few minutes to look over the email, in the hopes that this message will contain even more useful information than their last message.

Do you want people to look forward to hearing from you? Of course you do. All it takes is a little work...and you're used to that. Being a business owner, you realize that everything you do is at least a little work. Your only question is, "Is this work going to pay off?".

Email marketing - when done well - always pays off. All you have to do is provide useful and interesting information to those who are looking for it. Your email will then be welcomed into their inboxes, rather than rejected as spam.

One good example is SitePoint. They're a design firm, and they produce books and lectures that serve the design community. I look forward to their email messages each week, as they almost always have something useful for me. If you visit their website, you can see that they offer some very helpful info.

You might not have so much to offer...but you do have something. If you didn't, you wouldn't be in business. Think about the value your clients or customers see in your business, and write it down. I can help you create an email campaign, if you need help, that will present this information to them in a nice format, and at a pretty low price. Think about that when you check your email.

YOUR CHURCH NEEDS A WEBSITE.

People are looking online for a church near them. If they don't find your church, they will find someone else's. My church receives new visitors regularly, many of whom find us online. That's what happens when your website does its job. Does your website do its job? In one summer, 15 new families came to our church from our website. At that time, that was a 20% increase in attendance.

Could you serve 20% more people?

Could 20% more people find a home in your church?

However, keep this in mind: in the moment that your church website goes live, you have an international ministry. My church's website receives visitors from at least 54 different countries this year. Many of those people are looking for information about God and the Bible. When planning your website, plan ahead for how to serve these people. It's an easy way to make a big impact.

Until recently, fancy fonts didn't work well on the web. The reason is simple: to display text in any particular font, that font must be installed on your computer. Because web designers have no idea which of your visitors might actually own that fancy font, we had to work around this limitation.

Back in the bad old days, we had to make pictures of the words using the fancy fonts. That's not bad for a small website, but imagine using fancy fonts for something like a blog...you would have to make a new image for every post!

Today, things are a lot easier. We can now upload a copy of the fancy font to our web server, and then tell our stylesheets to use that font. Visitors will automatically download a temporary copy of the font when they view the page, so they can see text displayed using that font.

Two great resources:

Font Squirrel, where you can find lots of great free fonts to use on your websites, and
Google Web Fonts, where you can simply link to the fonts instead of uploading them.

Both are great resources, and fairly simple to use. Designers can use all kinds of great fonts without having to do the extra work to get it done. Let me know if you see a font you want on your website. It's not that complicated, so we can make a quick change pretty easily.

It's what new programmers and web coders learn first. We learn how to make a web page say "Hello, World". This is the first Straight Street Design blog post.

I've been a blogger for years, on a number of websites. I simply haven't blogged here...and I'm looking forward to it. I'll be posting quick and easy articles on the kinds of things that might interest my clients, as well as things that might help other web designers.

Read on!