Ken’s Sandbox

It’s interesting, that when something surfaces it seems to start poping up everywhere. That is how it seems to be for me now with e-cards. I’m hoping to spark some discussion on the subject. I hope you will take the time to give me your feedback.

A newsletter I receive regularly was talking about sending out Christmas (Holiday for the PC among you) cards and mentioned that she had found a site where you could send very nice classy business type e-cards for several occasions.

Then at lunch today, out of the blue, my mother mentioned how she hates all of the typical e-card sites out there but that she discovered one that was so simple an nice that she just had to subscribe. She said the site was by an artist in the UK who was using the e-cards to promote her art.

I checked out the site mentioned in the newsletter and the cards are beautiful. Their site focused strongly on the environmental benefits of sending e-cards. I believe this significantly helped overcome the “cheapness factor” of sending an e-card over a paper card.

However, when you use their free service, the page with the card is more advertisement than card and the only option to get rid of the advertising seemed to be having them build you a custom e-card site. Fine (maybe) if you are a large company but I believe I can do better.

Normally, at this point I would run off and throw together a proof of concept of what I think a site like this should do. Then it would sit in the drawer (or on the shelf, whichever metaphor you prefer) never to grace anyone’s web browser.

Here is my criteria for what a nice but simple e-card (suitable for use by a business professional) should do or be:

• e-cards have become a vehicle for viruses, spam and other ugliness. The card must arrive as an email from the sender with sender defined subject line.
• Preferably, the card would display in the recipient’s email program without them having to follow a link. No “so-and-so has sent you an e-card click here …”. Just display the damn card. The recipient may have to click a button to show images in their email client but nothing more. Of course, if they opt to not receive HTML email there would be a link to display the card in their web browser.
• Finally, I believe many business people (especially sales and marketing types) would like to have their photo on their cards.

I would really appreciate your feedback on this. I believe a tool like this would be a great relationship building tool. Give me your ideas, suggestions, objections. Is it something you would use and why or why not?

Thank you in advance.

Ken

I just left the Home Depot site where I was trying to locate a strip light for behind a valance in our living room. Working from home I am on a not-so-broad broadband satellite connection and every page load is painfull. Especially considering the site would probably take 30 seconds to load on my 7mb fiber at the office.

I managed to get to lighting ok but nothing in any of the categories or manufacturers seemed like a good fit for my search so I chose the under $50 category. The first 9 of 300+ entries came up. At the top are options to sort, change to a grid view and change the number of results per page. I changed the sort and the page reloaded. I realized that changing to grid view or changing the number of results per page were both going to result in a page load. So, which do I select first? My decision, close the wuindow. Screw ‘em, I don’t need to find it that bad.

If you are the webmaster of a large site like this (or the CIO of the company), you definitely should visit your site through a dial up connection and try to actually use it. When you finally get fed up, go back and add some simple ajax to the site to eliminate those full page loads and make your site usable for those with slow connections and really nice for those with fast connections.

Well, I’m off to Lowes .

Ken