Make Mine a Single

My friend Brian forwarded me an article espousing the benefits of “double opt-in” versus “single opt-in” for people signing up for e-mail newsletters. Single opt-in requires them to sign up. Double opt-in adds an extra step…

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If You Really Must Have a Design, (Im)Prove It

You may feel very strongly that your website should look a certain way. But the fact is, it doesn’t matter what you think. It doesn’t matter what your designer thinks, either. And it doesn’t matter what your webmaster thinks. What matters is what your customers think.

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You Say You Want to Make a Resolution?

“Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.” – Sir Winston Churchill “New Year resolutions are a waste of time,” my dad, a down-to-earth plumber in Northern England, always said. “Fads. Like diets. I never follow them so I never make them.” Instead, he was an advocate of quiet self-reflection at church, while watching cricket on a Sunday…

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First Impressions Count

“If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.” – David Ogilvy “Did you buy milk for Daniel yesterday?” “No, I thought YOU did!” So I did what any parent would in that situation. I decanted some of our goat’s milk into the near-empty cow’s milk carton and put it back in the fridge. You see, we…

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Too Much of a Good Thing

“Trust in God but make sure your camels are tied up” – Arabic Proverb Living our dream is quite different from dreaming it. For one thing, there’s a lot more poop than my wife and I had considered when our farm was still a dream. Then there is the daily deluge of eggs, which we’re…

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Horsing Around With Online Discounts

“Everyone appreciates getting a little something extra from the companies they do business with.” – Scott Deaver As I can tell you from experience, the cost of buying a horse is a fraction of the total cost of owning one. And so it came as a relief when I discovered Horse.com, “the source of everything…

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