Posted: December 26th, 2009 | Author: Gordon | Filed under: design | Tags: email signatures | View Comments
The issue came up because I wanted to integrate this website into my email signature. As I was doing this, I realized how much I subconsciously read into the functional aesthetic that goes into email signatures.
When I say functional aesthetic, I think of the question on hunch.com that asks how you put toilet paper on a roll. Does it roll over the top or bottom? These kinds of details give you a lot of insight into someone’s personality. For example, in two specific cases today, I noticed one email signature with a nice step down pattern from first to last line. Another had five jagged lines that were long and confusing. So these were the things going through my head when I created my new email signature.
I decided not to include two hyphens at the top of the signature because when you end an email with your closer (sincerely, best, etc), in the next line you naturally leave your name. But when you have a hyphen break above your name, it makes it very unnatural to follow the closer with your signature; it makes you want to say “Sincerely, Gordon Zhu” in addition to your signature at the bottom. I think the urge to do this comes from the disconnect that arises from having the hyphen break.
What do you think? If you change your signature after reading this post, I’d love to hear about it.
Before:
Gordon Zhu
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
Candidate BS Economics | Class of 2010
000.000.0000 | email@wharton.upenn.edu
After:
Gordon Zhu | Penn 2010 | 000.000.0000
email@wharton.upenn.edu | www.gordonzhu.com
Posted: December 23rd, 2009 | Author: Gordon | Filed under: uncategorized | Tags: seo, web analytics, web presence | View Comments
I’m going to move this blog back to WordPress. This decision is the result of a few things:
- I’m working on building a long-term web presence and want ultimate flexibility.
- Posterous has very limited options to monetize this blog. Right now my Adsense account is only linked to feedburner and among my initial readership (friends and family), few are subscribers because few know what RSS is.
- Having a more robust monetization effort will allow me to learn more about web analytics and will encourage me to drive more traffic.
- WordPress gives me more license to also optimize my blog for SEO, especially once I launch on my own hosted domain.
- I’ll have the chance to tweak and maybe create my own WordPress theme, which will give me experience with languages such as HTML and CSS.
- I’ve been working on building a blogging tool that is similar to Skribit, and am trying to implement it in simple form as a Widget. Wordpress will give me the largest userbase to allow for testing and analytics for the new app. This will also be a great excuse to learn PHP on my own.
- This will keep me busy for quite some time! Especially if boredom hits (inevitably) over winter break!
Posted via email from things that i remember
Posted: December 15th, 2009 | Author: Gordon | Filed under: uncategorized | View Comments
The last month has been incredibly hectic and the next few days will be even more busy as final exams and projects close out the semester. Look for a more consistent content stream shortly after my last final on December 22nd.
See you then!
Posted via web from things that i remember
