Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Edmond,

We evaluated a number of email delivery providers just over a year ago and found that many of them offer tips on how to avoid ending up in the Spam folder. http://documentation.mailgun.com/best_practices.html and http://go.sendgrid.com/rs/sendgrid/images/SendGrid_Deliverability_Guide.pdf being great places to start.

MailChimp has a lot of extra features such as list management and templates. Because you're managing your own user lists and have a trigger for sending individual emails you may be better off using a service that just sends emails. Mailchimp have a subsidiary called Mandrill that does just that (http://mandrill.com/), but other big players include Mailgun (http://www.mailgun.com) and SendGrid (http://sendgrid.com/).

We ended up using Mailgun and have grown with them from sending 2 million emails a month to 10 million emails a month, and while every situation is different I can highly recommend them.

Hope that helps!

Hi Noah's Dad,

Great site, I'd not seen it before but I'm very impressed and take my hat off to you.

See what you mean about the top most item in the main menus, and I imagine a large percentage of people wouldn't know to click on "Down Syndrome Resources". There's two ways to tackle it.

The first option would be to have another link in the drop down menu with either the same name or "All Down Syndrome Resources". From a usability point of view I'd lean towards that.

The other option would be to try and highlight the fact that the top menu text is a link. By convention most people associate underlined text with a link, so my suggestion would be that when someone hovers over it (or the submenu) to underline the top menu text.

With having sub-categories for Therapy I think that's a great idea. If you had a smaller site with less content it may not be worth worrying about, but both for SEO and simply to make it easier for visitors to find what they're looking for I think that's the best thing to do.

For category index landing pages I wouldn't change the structure that you have, just spice it up a bit. Having a blurb at the top followed by posts is a good way to do it, but the introductory text that you have at the moment is a bit hard to notice. On http://noahsdad.com/therapy/ for example the headline is a plain 'Archives For Therapy' and then the text colour is medium-grey on a grey background so it's easy for the eye to skim past it straight to the first post.

If for that introductory section you have the text on a white background with a catchy headline and maybe a picture, I think that'll make a world of difference.

That's about all I can think of for now but if I come up with anything else I'll let you know. In the meantime if you have any questions please let me know and I'll do my best to help.

Cheers,

Bruce

Thanks for the info Kevin.

'Sales' may be a bad example, all of our catalog, related products, recently viewed products, etc. have the same style of code for the images. I'll keep doing that

Thanks again,

Bruce

Hi guys,

Just thought I'd ask for opinions about an ecommerce catalog I'm working on. I don't know if it's even worth worrying about, but here's the scenario. Let's say I'm linking to a category called 'Sale' using an image, I have the title tag of the link as 'Sale', the image title is also 'Sale' as well as the alt tag.

The HTML looks like this:

The page itself is: http://www.fashionbasicsonline.com/catDisplay

So my question is, do you think I'm stuffing the keyword in too many times there? It's CMS driven so I could have the alt tag as 'Sale Products' or one of the titles as 'Sale Catalog' perhaps, do you think there would be a benefit in doing that?

Maybe it's microoptimisation and I should be looking at other low hanging fruit, but I'm just trying to come up with the best scenario. Would love to hear what you think.

Cheers,

Bruce

p.s. Looking forward to meeting as many people as possible at MozCon next week

Hi Edmond,

We evaluated a number of email delivery providers just over a year ago and found that many of them offer tips on how to avoid ending up in the Spam folder. http://documentation.mailgun.com/best_practices.html and http://go.sendgrid.com/rs/sendgrid/images/SendGrid_Deliverability_Guide.pdf being great places to start.

MailChimp has a lot of extra features such as list management and templates. Because you're managing your own user lists and have a trigger for sending individual emails you may be better off using a service that just sends emails. Mailchimp have a subsidiary called Mandrill that does just that (http://mandrill.com/), but other big players include Mailgun (http://www.mailgun.com) and SendGrid (http://sendgrid.com/).

We ended up using Mailgun and have grown with them from sending 2 million emails a month to 10 million emails a month, and while every situation is different I can highly recommend them.

Hope that helps!