Announcements

SparkUp is really rocking conference that’s going to be in Poland, Poznań. Members of our team are going to be there. Yes, that’s right! You should check out the list of speakers, then you can say WOW, and THEN you can book a ticket for that conference.

We have to be honest… the price is really funny – 70 euro. It’s not too much, is it? You can pick one of two paths:

1. for web developers
2. for web designers

But we are pretty sure that it will be possible to mix both tracks. It looks like it going to be awesome event. We really can’t wait!

About speakers… We don’t really have to say too much, the names alone should be enough to WOW you:

• Andy Budd from Clearleft
• Bruce Lawson from Opera Software
• Bartłomiej Zess from Microsoft
• Matt Bidulph from Nokia
• … and many more!

Besides, we are 50% (that’s a lot, huh? ) sure that you haven’t been to Poland. It’s a beautiful country, especially the Poznań city. It’s amazing! Just check out the Google Images for “Poznań, Poland”.

Anyway, we are going to be there and we hope to meet you there as well!

Ohh! By the way, we are ready to have some drinks with everyone after party

Internet Explorer levels up as IE9 announcements were made today with Microsoft releasing the Windows Internet Explorer Platform Preview to the wild. The final version won’t hit mainstream until next year, however it’s great to see what been unveiled so far. With HTML5 support, focus on web-standards, javascript and speed improvements, it’s looking like Internet Explorer is finally catching up to the Jones. In the tradition of IE, it still likes to dance to it’s own beat – the lack of Canvas support and no WebKit-pioneered CSS properties (transform, transition, animations, gradients, etc) [boo Microsoft!] the line in sand will still be drawn as far as web designers are concerned. I doubt we’ll ever skip that phase in the web developer cycle of ‘making a site IE friendly’, but hopefully in the future there will be less curses that come with it.

Congratulations to our final winner of February, Bjarni Wark! Bjarni’s name was randomly picked (via random.org) Thank you to everyone who entered. Please stay tuned for more contests and promotions.

Congratulations to our third winner of the month, David of ticktockdesign.com! David commented on our blog entry, Comment to win!. David’s name was randomly picked (via random.org) Thank you to everyone who entered and if you didn’t win, don’t worry! Your chance for winning the final week has just begun. Stay tuned for more information!

Every now and then we come across a platform which makes us swoon. It’s happened! Everyone, please meet BigCommerce. BigCommerce provides an easy way to get up and running with an online store. See what people have to say about it.

We’ve had the pleasure of talking to the folks at BigCommerce over the last week and they are super folk. We’re cutting our teeth on BigCommerce, and as a special promotion, we’re offering a big deal for one lucky person! For the first person that gets in touch, we’ll do a BigCommerce template for 50% of our standard pricing!

Please email dave at xhtmlized.com if you have an online store you want to launch and let’s get to work!

Congratulations to our second winner of the month, @typeoneerror of typeoneerror.com! Ben tweeted about our contest and was randomly picked (via random.org) Thank you to everyone who entered and if you didn’t win, don’t worry! Your chance for winning week three has just begun. Stay tuned for more information!

Newsletters are becoming more and more popular for companies and even individuals, and for good reason. Newsletters allow you to keep your clients or customers informed of promotions, sales, contests, and of course, news. The great thing about newsletters is being able to communicate with a highly specific audience – your niche audience. Since signing up for a newsletter is generally done by the user, it means your subscribers are interested in your company and/or what you have to offer.

Sending out newsletters can establish yourself or your company as a market leader and being one that is reputable. You encourage buyers and you remind users of your company’s presence. However, it’s not good enough to just have a newsletter these days. A successful newsletter is one that gets read. In order to get your newsletter read, you must have a well planned, well written and well designed newsletter. The good news is, it’s not hard to get started and we can help you at any or all stages.

It’s as simple as one, two, three… (OK, four):

1. Find a company that can send your newsletter

   We recommend the leader of the pack, Campaign Monitor. Campaign Monitor is email marketing software for web designers and their clients. You can send beautiful email campaigns, track the results and manage your subscribers. It’s cheap too, at only $5 per campaign + 1 cent per recipient. That means you can send your newsletter to 500 people for just $10!

   We’ve been using Campaign Monitor and we have to say, the most encouraging information is the powerful analytics. You can see which subscribers opened your newsletter, which unsubscribed, what email clients they are using, what links they clicked and more. It’s powerful information that can help you redefine the way you send future newsletters.

2. Find or create a template

   Campaign Monitor offers a variety of free templates, all tested and proven to work in all the major email clients. It’s as simple as adding your own content. If you want to distinguish yourself from others, you may want to design your own newsletter, or have us design one for you. When coding a newsletter, you have to be very careful. If you thought web browser support was bad (hello, IE), once you see the world of email clients, you’ll be surprised by the poor support. Microsoft, again, shames us with Outlook 2007 and it’s upcoming 2010 (tweet about it). However, have no fear! We have a great team of newsletter coders who just love to get down and dirty with tables.

3. Fill in your interesting content

   There’s two ways you can do this. You can (or have us) create an email template for Campaign Monitor. This will allow you to change your content each month, with great ease. No messing around with the code, you use Campaign Monitors WYSIWYG editor and see your changes in real-time. Change your titles, content and images easily with use of a template. Or, if your a code monkey, you can make the changes to the code yourself, but with a powerful editor like in Campaign Monitor, there’s no reason to.

4. Send your Campaign

   Follow the steps in Campaign Monitor and send your campaign. It’s simple, intuitive and fast. That’s all there is to it!

At XHTMLized we offer newsletter designs, newsletter copy and of course, newsletter coding & templates. Contact us today for an estimate!

You know, while we’re on the topic of newsletters… how about you join ours? Put your email address in the form at the bottom of this page and you’ll be able to hear our exciting news each month! Oh, and in case you were wondering, Campaign Monitor supplies you with the form code, so you too can add a newsletter registration form on your website with a quick copy and paste. See? Campaign Monitor really is great! (and no, we’re not getting paid to say that, we truly are blown away)

We’re currently redesigning our order form at XHTMLized to make it more simple so we can get to work more quickly!

We’d love to hear if anyone has seen some good order forms out there or things you’d like to see on ours.

At XHTMLized all our work comes from word of mouth and repeat business. It’s a pretty unique position and we want to thank all our fans for making that possible, thank you!

2010 is our year to scale! As we’ve been rolling out our expansion, we’ve started to focus a bit of effort in driving new customers and traffic.

We’re pleased see some great results already. Compared to our main competition in the PSD2HTML space we’re making a huge impact. In the last month XHTMLized is up by +1,348.70%, while PSD2HTML is down -10.63%. Looking at it from a year perspective XHTMLized is up +408.20% and PSD2HTML is down -57.65%.

These results are with no banner ads and no advertising. We can’t wait until we really kick it into gear!

Google Apps have announced they will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 over the year 2010, in order to harness newer browser technology such as HTML5.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.