Comes the desperately overdue project for some kind of synoptic understanding of standards in e-mail.

Sweet mercy, is that an oasis?

Here's the introductory blog post:

[W]hy is it so hard to build a decent HTML email? The answer was not that nobody really cared, it was that the people who cared weren’t in a position to make any difference, or were not getting any support.

That’s what the Email Standards Project is about: Making sure that people do care, that they do see why having standards support for email clients is important. And about making sure that our voices are heard by the people who can make a difference, the email client developers.

This is not about complaining or being unrealistic. It’s about making contact with the right people, and getting them all the support they can use to improve their email clients. We want to work with the design community and the email clients to set some goals for email standards so that we can aim at a future when HTML email is not so hard.

They only seem small until they seem big.

Update: Fox lawyers say Family Guy YouTube posts also have a design flaw.

A recent conversation about the vagaries of HTML e-mail on the Progressive Exchange mailing list prompted some good conversation about a perennially vexing topic: how do you keep your hard-won html design rendering properly in your recipients' mailboxes?

Short answer: you probably don't.

For coders who like to get into it, I've been in the habit of recommending the exhaustive sleuthing done by sorta-competitor Campaign Monitor (for instance), which blogs the bejeezus out of the issue and has great resources like 30 free design-compliant templates that might shortcut the process.

The thumbnail version for the rest of us is that there's no orthodoxy. Like 4th century heretics, every e-mail provider has its own slightly different standard which on pain of hellfire and junk filtering is incompatible with every other provider's standard.

What's a small organization without the luxury of coding line-by-line styles to do?

(Susan Finkelpearl of former DIA roommates Free Range Graphics has this week's Tuesday Tips entry on a little spring cleaning for the web site. This post is also available as a .pdf, and will be one of her handouts at the Nonprofit Tech Conference this week. We could probably stand to take note of a few of these tips ourselves ... thanks, Susan! -jrz)

Have you given your website some design love lately? Here are some fast tips for taking your site to the next level.

1. Don’t forget the fold. Just as old-fashioned newspapers have a fold line, if a web page gets too long, people will have to scroll to see all of the content on the page. When designing your home and interior pages, make sure to put important items such as news features, donate buttons, and e-newsletter sign-ups above the fold, where they can be seen easily.

2. Be a creative conformist. The web works because key site elements appear in consistent locations across all well-designed web sites. While you want your website to have a look and feel that is unique to your organization, make sure you also follow design conventions. For example, people have come to expect that search bars be placed in the top right of a webpage while logos are most often in the top left position. Nine times out of ten you should stick with these conventions. Groups like Amazon play with these conventions, but again it’s generally wisest to plunk key navigational elements where people expect to see them.

3. Make your asks contextual. Don’t let isolated "donate buttons" do all the fundraising legwork on your site. Work donation asks into areas where you are telling the most compelling stories about your accomplishments.

4. Let thy people donate! When someone does click a donate button, reward them immediately with a donate form. Don’t make them click more or wade through a lot of copy before letting them help you. In fact, it’s highly recommended that the form be the default first page of your donate section.

Our friends (and former landladies and -lords) down the way at Free Range Graphics are offering Gratitude Grant(s) for compelling progressive causes.

Free Range -- the brains behind such design/marketing brilliance as The Meatrix -- tantalizes with the prospect of:

up to $15,000 worth of our communications services from our menu of core offerings: strategic communications consulting, organizational identity, print design, web design and Flash animation.

Need to rally activists around an issue or capture critical media attention? Modernize your logo? Chart out an online fundraising strategy? As long as you have a concrete goal and a mission that makes a positive difference for our planet and its people, we encourage you to apply!

Via the nptech tag stream comes word of Designing Inward Out, "a public diary of a non-profit's website redesign process," a young blog unspooling for months to come with the searchingly expository particulars of what the first post calls "the underbelly of a project."

One that might look not entirely unfamiliar, even if, to paraphrase Tolstoy, every nonprofit website redesign is redesigned in its own way. This ought to be an interesting read, and for a process glacial enough for deliberative liveblogging.

Ordinarily being the kind of insufferable nitpick to chafe at minor spelling infringements, I was surprised to learn that the master login page I've been using for going on two years now ... well, it ...

Amazingly, none of the other 10+ folks who use this page -- many of them daily, for thousands (at least) of combined page views among them -- noticed the typo in glaring h1 font either, until someone went to access it through a handheld and was forced by the unfamiliar display to, as it were, read it anew.

We thought DemocracyInAction could use a fresh wrapper.

With fond farewells to the that honest, bygone site that bent with the wear of carrying us through the Sturm und Drang of adolescence. Walk away proud ...

... but do walk away.

And if I loved you Wednesday,
Well, what is that to you?