At the Snowcial conference last week, I got the opportunity to share a quick, 5 minute presentation on whatever topic I chose. I got 20 slides, auto advancing every 15 seconds. Most people try to be funny with these sorts of things, but I warned David Laplante (the organizer) of my lack of stage humor and he assured me it was okay to share whatever I pleased. So, I did and was reminded how awesome my facial expressions are when I’m nervous and exaggerate my expressions :)

Recently, I had the chance to write an article about ski resorts and social media marketing for the NSAA Journal. What I didn’t realize is that it would be the cover story. Pretty dang cool.

I haven’t posted on here in a while so I thought I’d share this little infographic I whipped up last night. I originally had other content ready but the idea came and figured I’d just get it out now rather than later. Not my best work, but considering it was less than 2 hours start to finish (including data gathering), I’m pretty happy with it.

Original Post:
http://www.slopefillers.com/one-day-of-ski-resort-social-media-activity-infographic/

When Canyons Resort updated their logo last year I didn’t catch it at first because it reminded me so much of two other logos I had seen: Origin Design and Orange. Since then, they just keep popping up.

I’ve done very little coding for email templates. In fact, in the last five years, I can count all such projects on one hand. Recently, I forced myself to not defer the duties of coding a new template to our guru, Kurt, but rather put that task on my to-do list and get up to speed on best practices as well. Here’s a reminder list for me when I do my next template, but also for anyone else who is interested:

1. Layout - Use tables for layouts, not divs.

2. Stylesheets - Don’t use stylesheets. Keep your styling inline, most email programs strip out stylesheets.

3. Padding / Margin - Use empty cells and rows for padding rather than “padding” or “margin” css attributes.

4. Text Areas – Don’t use style=”width: ____;” or width=”" on div or paragraph tags. Outlook ignores them. Define width by the size of the cell the content sits in.

5. H_ Tags – Include a <span style=”color: #000000;”> tag around the text of any header tags (h1,h2,h3, etc.). Hotmail ignores your color assignment and sticks in their own weird scheme.

6. Images – Use style=”display: block” in all IMG tags so you don’t get a gap below your images.

7. Background Images – Best bet, don’t use them. They display inconsistently (if at all) in email programs.

8. Borders – Cell borders seem to never be displayed right with tables. If you need a vertical border, try using cols with width=”1″ and a background color instead.

9. Images & Line-Height – Remember your table’s defined line height. If you have a row with a defined height of 12px and a line-height of 16px, that row will be 16px tall. If an image 8px tall sits in that cell, even with no text around it, you’ll have a gap.

10. Test – Code like it’s 1996 and test like mad.