Now that the baseball season is finally over, I’ve spent some time finally working on one of my sites. I’ve decided it’s in enough of a state of completion (still has a few bare spots!) that I’ve gone ahead and launched it. Since it’s “by webmasters, for webmasters,” I’m sure you webmasters out there will understand that it’s still under construction, and probably always will be!

I’m still looking for a good php programmer to contribute as an expert. I’ll be expanding on the Meet the Pros section on the left sidebar. Each will click through to a page with introductions and links instead of just through to offsite blogs as they do now. That’s tomorrow’s work!

Take a look, and I hope you will feel it will be a useful resource to you as a webmaster. If you feel it is lacking in any way, please leave a comment on the forum. The general theme of the site is ‘share with your peers, and they will share with you.’ Click here to get started: marketspring.net

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It seems all I’m hearing about is email marketing lately. I don’t know about you but I HATE it when I get unsolicited junk in my email box. Email marketing has its definite advantages, when the sender has permission to send it to you. Unfortunately most of what I get is NOT approved by me.

Being in the web design business, I have many clients who ask for email newsletter capabilities. I am more than happy to provide them with it, but we have strict rules for our clients using our servers about mass marketing through email.

First, and foremost, all email addressees on their mail lists must be clients, or must have signed up for their newsletter. We do not permit the use of purchased mail lists, and this is why; simply put, we do not want our email servers to be blacklisted.

I had a client tell me today that she was going to send out an email blast to 20,000 people this week. I almost had a heart attack! Immediately she responded very kindly with, “Don’t worry, I use an outside email campaign manager and we’ve done this many times before. We send them over a period of a couple days and haven’t had any problems yet”.

That got me thinking. I know about these mass email companies that are very popular on the web. Apparently they must be paying off the blacklist companies or something if this service she described is what they are selling? Does this also mean that they are responsible for the hundreds of junk emails I get? I know that many of the spammers manage to serve up their spam email themselves, but it sure seems like the companies who provide email campaigns like the one my client is about to do HAVE to take some responsibility for the deluge of junk mail.

Please, share your thoughts on this. I’m interested to hear. Am I off base here? You tell me.

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For all you webmasters out there who might happen to be php or asp experts:

As I already mentioned, I’m putting together a site ‘for webmasters, by webmasters’. My intention is to make the site an invaluable resource for all webmasters to use. Through the years I’ve accumulated a wealth of information on the web that I access every day. My new site, marketspring.net, will be loaded with this information, and links to where even more information and market news can be found. 

What I am looking for is informational links to use for php and asp programming. Can you suggest some? Or would you be willing to write an article for the site about the subject? I will be happy to give you credit and link you in. Contact me if this sounds like something worth interest.

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