Online shoppers have a lot of choices, and it’s often not price that makes the difference, but convenience. Help your customers get a lot done, and they’ll keep coming back.

To all our clients and readers we wish a successful and trouble-free holiday season. Most importantly, we hope you and your families enjoy the holidays together and have a wonderful new year.

There are moments I don’t enjoy, though. One of those usually happens like this:

Client (showing me a digital photo):

“Hey, I want to use this on the website.”

Me:

“Great! That looks perfect. Where was this taken?”

Client:

“I don’t know, I found it on the Internet.”

Me:

“Oh…”

• “To copyright something, mail it to yourself and don’t open it.” — This is not necessary for copyright. According to U.S. law, the moment you create something, no matter what you do with it, you have a copyright. But if you’re concerned someone might try to claim they created the work first, go ahead and send it to yourself — it’s a cheap, easy way to record when you created something.

  Update: Johnathan Lyons wrote in with some thoughts on this:

  [this] is actually a common myth as well. Even an unopened certified letter can be easily steamed open and its contents replaced (or so the defense will claim), so the “mailed it to myself” proof of copyright is ineffective and somewhat counter productive.

  The best way to do it, is gather all of the work you want to protect and file it with the US Patent, trademark and Copyright office as your “Collected Works” for a single filing fee. I believe the charge is about $35.

  I hadn’t thought about it that way, but he’s right—there’s no way that envelope is going to stand up in court, so it’s probably a waste of time.

• “If it’s on the Internet, it’s not copyrighted.” — Actually, almost the opposite is true. With the exception of those things old enough to be in the public domain, or specifically released by their creators into the public domain, everything online is copyrighted.

  So where can you go to find images you can use? When you’re looking for clip art or stock photography, it’s best to skip Google and go straight to a royalty-free image website. We use iStockPhoto a lot—the quality and variety is good, and the prices are relatively inexpensive. You can also use search engines that specifically find works released under a Creative Commons (CC) license. Artists use Creative Commons to indicate they are ok with certain uses of their works. Always be sure your use is compatible with the work’s CC license. And if a photograph includes people, keep in mind that a CC license does not excuse you from needing a model release.

• “It’s not copyright infringement if you change the original work by at least 10%.” — Wrong, and this one’s easy to test: Go buy Ratatouille on DVD. Then, on your home computer, replace the middle 11 minutes with your own drawings of mice. Release it online, and see which comes first—your Academy Award nomination, or a cease-and-desist from Disney.

  It is possible to use an existing work within your own work—it’s called fair use—but there’s no magic percentage that makes it legal. If your work is a parody, or uses a very short piece of an existing work for illustrative purposes, you’re ok. There are other fair use provisions as well, but it’s a pretty gray area, and courts tend to err on the side of the copyright owner.

• “Images that come with your computer are ok to use.” — Applications like Microsoft Office come with a lot of clip art, and you might think you could use the images for anything. There are restrictions, however. Often, those restrictions prohibit commercial and/or online use. In the case of Office, Microsoft licenses its clip art from multiple vendors, so different images can have different use restrictions.

  Your software should have an End User License Agreement (EULA) within it (or on the vendor’s website) that will explain any use restrictions. Again, it’s usually best to stick with royalty-free or Creative Commons material.

• “You can’t take photos of somebody else’s house without their permission.” — While you certainly can’t go inside someone else’s house and take pictures without their permission, you can take photos outside without any problems. Generally, anything visible from the street can be legally photographed.

Copyright is very important in our business, so I do my best to keep up with the current laws. However, I cannot stress enough how much I am not a lawyer. While I do believe this is good advice, it’s best to consult with an attorney that specializes in intellectual property if you have a copyright issue.

Are there copyright concerns you’ve heard and wondered whether or not they were true? Or myths you know aren’t true that I didn’t cover? Send them to me and I’ll compile them for a future post.

As Jeremy Keith points out, this ruling has brought some disappointing reactions from some people in the web community. I wasn’t particularly surprised by this—I saw the same uninformed comments when this lawsuit began. However, I have been pleasantly surprised by the mainstream media coverage I’ve seen. In each case, the news correspondent—even though they clearly did not understand the technology behind web accessibility—asked the right question:

If Target can make their website accessible to the blind, why wouldn’t they?

And the answer is pretty simple: There is no reason not to. They can, and they should. Target has already made some progress on improving their website, hopefully the threat of a class action lawsuit will be the incentive they need to finish the job.

It’s very easy to shoot off a quick email, so most people don’t put much thought into it. But it’s like any other way you communicate: people are going to form an impression about you—not just on what you say, but on how you say it. So if you’re going to say something with email, say it like you mean it. Write it with conviction and style, in a way that makes your intentions clear.

• Use a meaningful subject line — A good, concise subject line can be difficult to create, but it will grab the receiver’s attention. It can also help keep your message out of the spam folder. If you’re emailing a customer, include your company name in the subject line: “Your contract from Smart Goat Web Design”. I find it helps to wait till after I’ve written the body of the email to write the subject line. At that point, I know exactly what the email is about and I can summarize it better.
• Be careful about attachments — Once you get used to broadband Internet, it’s easy to forget a lot of people still use dial-up. Sending large attachments to someone on a slow connection can cause a major headache for the recipient. For anything over a megabyte, it’s best to ask before you send. Or, upload the file to your website (or to a file-sending service like YouSendIt or MediaFire), then email the person a link to download the file.

• Default to plain text — Many email programs offer a variety of ways to add images, colors, and different fonts to your emails. But before you try all those options in one email, ask yourself if it really adds anything to your message. Chances are it doesn’t, and will instead distract from your content. There is not yet a standard for HTML email, so there’s a chance the styles of your message will get garbled upon delivery.

  If you’re using Outlook, you can default to sending plain text by going to Options under the Tools menu and selecting the Mail Format tab.

• Turn caps lock off — Some business applications require everything to be entered in capital letters, so some people get into the habit of typing this way. But on the Internet, writing in all caps is considered yelling, so it’s not appropriate for business emails. It’s also harder to read—part of the way we recognize whole words is by their shapes. You lose that shape when all the letters are the same height, and it slows down your reading.
• Use proper capitalization and punctuation — Following basic style guidelines will make your email more attractive and easier to read. Be sure to do these simple things:
  • Capitalize proper nouns and the first letter of the first word of each sentence.
  • End each sentence with a period, exclamation mark, or question mark.
  • Double-space between paragraphs. In fact, dividing your message into logical paragraphs will make it much more readable.
• Use your spell checker — Odds are, your email program has a built-in spell checker. Run it at least once before sending your message. Many email programs have the ability to do this automatically when you hit the Send button.

• Trim quotes in a reply — When replying, it’s rare that you need to quote the other person’s entire email in your response. Trim the quoted text down to only the part you are replying to, and type your reply directly below their message. This creates a very concise and easy-to-read email with a question followed immediately by the answer. So, with an email like this:

  From: Client
  To: Billy
  Subject: Improving our Accessibility
  Billy,
  
  The latest changes you sent look great. Go ahead and put them up on 
  the site as soon as you can.
  
  One other thing, I want to improve the accessibility of our site. What do 
  we need to do to accomplish that?
  
  Thanks,   
  Jane Q. Client  
  Client Company, Inc.  
  http://www.example.com  
  (405) 555-1234  
  The absolute best clients since 1891!

  I would reply like this:

  From: Billy
  To: Client
  Subject: RE: Improving our Accessibility
  On September 25, 2007, Client wrote:
  > One other thing, I want to improve the accessibility of our site.
  > What do we need to do to accomplish that?
  
  Jane,
  
  As it happens, I just wrote a blog post about that:
  
  <http://www.smartgoat.com/blog/understanding_web_accessibilit/>
  
  Read through that, then give me a call and we can discuss options.
  
  Thanks,
  -- 
  Billy Mabray
  Smart Goat Web Design
  http://www.smartgoat.com
  (405) 659-4822
  

• Include a short, informative signature — You might have noticed my email signature at the bottom of that reply. Your signature should be akin to your business card—a source for basic contact information. Email address is typically not necessary, since that’s part of the email itself. A favorite quote may or may not be appropriate, but a marketing “tag line” would be, especially if it tells something about what you do.

Yes, it takes a bit longer to write emails like this, but it’s worth it. When you pay attention to small details, you demonstrate a certain level of professionalism. This makes your customers more confident in you, and more willing to do business with you. I’ve also found that sending people quality emails encourages them to reciprocate, which improves communication in both directions.

Before you hit Send on your next email, go back and read it as if you were the person receiving it. Are you impressed? Are you convinced the sender knows what they’re talking about? Does the meaning come through loud and clear? If not, see if you can rewrite it… like you mean it.