Check those fancy listener emails

Here is something a lot of stations are getting wrong: email and website viewing on mobile devices and offline.

1. If a listener grabs email, but then looks at it later, when offline, the pictures won’t appear.

Your response: Check every email with picture downloading off. Is it still legible? Could it benefit from some work to clean it up?

2. If a listener punches up email on a Blackberry, the pictures aren’t there.

Your response: Same as above. But there is a second issue. The screen is really tiny. Expect even more problems to solve.

Solutions

The best solution is probably to send your emails out as plain text as well as HTML. At the top of the email, include “For a text-only version that is easy to read on a Smartphone, click here”.

You can also create a special version of your website. Often, this will be given a name with a “m.” (for mobile) at the beginning. This is a lot of work, but quite possibly worth it, as more an more people are using tiny screens. With proper programming, your website can be designed to sense when a mobile device is connecting, and automatically switch to the mobile version. This is definitely worth a chat with your IP people and/or webmaster.