Constant Contact and Ezine Director

To a colleague who asked about online publishing services for distributing e-newsletters and other mailings:

I tried out Constant Contact back in 2002. Constant Contact puts its logo at the bottom of all messages when you’re using the free trial, of course, but I found they continued to do it even after we paid for the service. If you ask them to take it off, they do, but it took a little bit of effort.

I think others aren’t as sensitive to that kind of thing as I am, but I thought I’d let you know that logo removal is possible after the trial period. Your old newsletter had a home-grown feel, and that distinguished it positively from others. On the other hand, the list management you get from an online service saves a lot of time. (I use Ezine Director at www.ezinedirector.com).

...I do like Ezine Director, or I wouldn’t have stayed with them. It’s simple, but it requires some willingness to learn on your own, too. It doesn’t aim for the turnkey publishing model of Constant Contact. Uploading lists in Ezine Director is quite easy: a real strength.

As for templates, I moved away from Constant Contact because of their complete reliance on pre-cooked templates. That’s how it was four years ago, anyway: you could go with a very basic plain text template, or walk your way through a series of screens that took the fun out of online publishing. When I was done filling in all the blanks and checking off all the boxes, I still didn’t like the result much, and there wasn’t much I could do to make changes.

Ezine Director doesn’t offer any templates. That’s where you have to be self-reliant, and they tell you so. I’m not an HTML expert by any means, though I’ve learned a little along the way. The best method is to work with a WYSIWYG HTML editor, then paste the source HTML from the editor to Ezine Director. I used FrontPage before I started using a Mac, and that worked well enough. The Mac has raised difficulties in that area. I had to look hard to find a simple, low-priced, WYSIWYG HTML editor for the Mac. I finally settled on Nvu, which is open source and free. Nvu is available for Windows also, and you should try it out if you’re interested in an HTML editor that has a lot of features, considering that you don’t have to buy it. The website is www.nvu.com. Here’s a blurb from their home page:

“Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.”

That’s encouraging to us non-experts!

For historical interest: The simple template and colors I use for Tips & Analysis began as a more complicated Constant Contact template years ago. I’ve used the layout both for my website and for the newsletter. But I like to keep things simple, not busy, and until I used my own editor I couldn’t make the layout look the way I wanted it to look.

Nothing is ever simple, though. After great care with the template, I generated the HTML for the newsletter you just received from a Word document, knowing that you take your professional sanity in your hands when you do that. Sure enough, I paid for it in time and headaches. That was after I learned the hard way that the best way to prepare the text for a newsletter is in a plain text editor, then paste the text into a simple HTML template. Anyway, the formatting of the current newsletter turned out fine, but under the hood, the source code is a near nightmare at first glance. So much for my simple template.