Hi Christine,
I do not consider the OO.o newsletter to be a marketplace.
I am fully agree that an OO.o related market place would be valuable.
For now we do have two pages which covering OO.o service and products
http://bizdev.openoffice.org/consultants.html
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org_Solutions
the design of the pages are a mess but the wiki concept has the
advantage that every OO.o user can add their services to the page.
due to the lack on resources there is currently no immediate plan to
improve the pages.
However back to the newsletter design . Creating an Text and HTML
version of the newsletter would take too long due to the fact that I am
creating the newsletter manually. If we decided to go with the Text
format, we can discuss a new design.
Regards
Kay
On 08/17/09 15:50, Christine Louise Beems wrote:
Hello Alex, Kay and all. I am new to this list (having been lurking
for a week), learning to use OpenOffice (and enjoying it) and
minimally conversant with OpenSource applications & ideology, all of
which I find very impressive.
My competency is in creative development, media, marketing and
communications, in light of which I offer a perspective on the OO.o
newsletter:
While I know that 'everyone' is going to html, I suggest that the
marketplace is not yet sufficiently equipped to recieve html email.
The attached screenshot shows what will most likely come up as a
'first look' in the majority of Inboxes... which in strictest
promotional terms means that the space which *should* be devoted to
your 'hook' (lead information that draws the reader deeper into the
content) is being 'wasted' on a blank graphic.
Also consider that a substantial number of the 'professional end
users' (who are not employed in IT but are in many instances 'the
decision makers') are minimally technology literate... which I do not
say as a discredit but simply as diagnosis of facts so that the
'needs' of the marketplace are pragmatically assessed in terms of
providing a legitimate service to the clients we seek to serve.
In this light consider that what these professionals greatly value is
'consistency'. We (all of us) have a job to do and we want to do it
efficiently, effectively and competently... and it drives us (the
non-tech office worker) nutz when we have to spend half of our
'production time' learning the nuances of some new-and-improved
'upgrade' in order to do what we knew how to do perfectly last week...
(smile).
And finally, it might be worth considering that html formatting raises
one's 'score' with the spam-gods, which can raise a newsletter's
bounce-back rate considerably and cascade to blacklisting by various
ISPs.
Thus in terms of newsletter design I would suggest continuing to
distribute in (creatively formatted) plain text but also offering a
link to a nicely formatted PDF version and/or a link to a webpage
where the html formatted version (optimally with photos/graphics) is
posted.
Anyway, all just my opinion and perhaps not of any use...??? In any
event, I am enjoying using OpenOffice because (so far at least) the
process of 'learning' has been highly intuitive, making for an easy
transition from the closed source applications I have been using for
all these many years. Thanks!!! ~Christine Beems
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