Simply create a new ‘Form’ from the drop-down (on the left of your Google Documents account) and follow the beautifully simple process.

Add text fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, selecting which questions you want as mandatory.

Once you are happy with the form, send out a link to your mailing list pointing people to the form (or embed it in your webpage).

All responses are automatically inputted into a Google Spreadsheet, saving you the hassle of manually inputting data, while providing useful graphical summaries of the results as they come in.

For a detailed tutorial watch this Google support video. All pretty impressive.

Of course, the problem is that you are stuck with the Google styling, but there is a solution. Have a look at the tutorial at Morning Copy for more information.

Joe Clark take a close look at the Vancouver 2010 site and finds it coming up short.

However, if the email doesn’t display correctly in your subscribers inbox then design and strategy are mute points.

There a dozen and more different email clients around; Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Entourage… the list goes on.

Unfortunately, most of these email clients interpret code slightly differently. Resulting in at best, a slightly disjointed looking email; or at worst, an email that is unreadable.

So here are two tips that will help to standardise the layout of your emails, no matter which email client is being used.

1. Use inline styles

Many good people have spent years, encouraging web designers to separate the presentation (CSS) from mark-up (XHTML). Calling on us to leave inline styles behind.

And to a large degree they’ve been successful; people saw the light and embraced it.

But if you want your emails to display correctly in as many email platforms as possible, you’re going to have to use inline styles.

If you don’t use inline styles some email clients will overwrite your styles with their own.

For instance, if you don’t place inline styles in the <a> tag, Hotmail will display the link in the default blue:

<p style="font-family:arial, verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; color:#FFFFFF; margin:0;">Here is a sentence that <a href="#" title="A link">contains a link</a>. I wonder colour it will be?</p>

That link becomes virtually invisible if it’s sitting on a blue background:

Here’s what you need to do:

<p style="font-family:arial, verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; color:#FFFFFF; margin:0;">Here is a sentence that <a href="#" title="A link" style="font-family:arial, verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; color:#FFFFFF; margin:0; text-decoration:underline;">contains a link</a>. I wonder colour it will be?</p>

Note that I’ve even specified text-decoration:underline; Who knows, maybe the email client styles links without an underline.

I’ve also used:

color:#FFFFFF;

Rather than the shorthand:

color:#FFF;

This is because some some email clients don’t recognise the shortened three character hexadecimal code.

The message is to play it safe. If you want links to have an underline, don’t assume that that is the default setting. Define it in an inline style.

I know it’s painful, I know you thought those bad old days were long gone, but if you want a successful email campaign, inline styles will help you on your way.

2. Use tables to layout your email

Again, another blast from the not-so-glorious past, when tables ruled and mark-up was bogged down by endless <tr> and <td> tags.

But guess what, because of the inconsistencies between email clients, tables are the most stable way of laying out your email.

Again, if you want to style your tables in any way use inline styles:

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" align="center" bgcolor="#000964" style="background-color:#000964">
<tr>
<td height="25">&nbsp;</td>
<td bgcolor="#CECECE" style="background-color:#CECECE">&nbsp;</td>
<td></td>&nbsp;</td>
</tr>
</table>
So there are two very basic tips that should create a stable base from which to work.

There are other quirks that you need to watch out for, but with enough testing they can be ironed out.

These kind of things aren’t normally my cup of tea; the idea of standing in a corner of a room that’s full of people who I don’t know doesn’t appeal. I inevitably get caught in a conversation with the guy who pressure washes drives… who isn’t interested in spending money on a website. But after a gentle push from a friend, I got a handful of business cards and off I went.

What struck me was the positive atmosphere that they have engendered. They genuinely seemed to want to help each other succeed.

The idea is that there are 12-15 people, who meet every week with the goal of getting as many referrals for the other members as they can. I can’t remember what the phrase they used was, but it was basically ‘treat others how you want to be treated’. If you want business, you try and get other people business.

At first glance you wonder how many leads you can get from 12 people. But of course, it’s not just 12 people. It’s the 100 people that those people know. And it’s the 100 people they know.

So a conversation that you think is going nowhere, could just end up with a business lead. All you need to do is be friendly, ask questions about their line of work, explain your services and you never know.

Maybe the guy who pressure washes drives might be worth talking too. I wonder what his client list is…

Sure enough, shortcuts became my new best friend, and ever since I’ve made an effort to seek out and learn software shortcuts.

So, here’s some Photoshop shortcuts, simple if you know them, but if you don’t, they could seriously ease your workflow.

Using the foreground and background colours

Foreground and background colours

• Change colour of objects in layer to foreground colour by selecting the layer you want to change and hit alt + backspace
• Conversely, you can change the colour of an object to the background colour by pressing apple + backspace
• Swap the background and foreground colour: ‘x’
• Select the eye dropper tool to change the foreground colour: ‘i’
• Change the foreground and background colour back to the default selection (normally black and white): ‘d’

Discovering the above saved me loads of time over the years. Especially the first two; they work far better than simply using the paint bucket, which pixelates the edges of an object.

Marquees

Select the marquee tool (‘m’), or lasso tool (‘l’), and create a selection on your canvas.

• To invert a marquee selection: apple + ‘i’
• Delete the selection: apple + ‘d’

OK, hope that helps.

Hopefully, this will be the first of many!