Insights

Miscommunication, my friends, can lead to embarrassing results. While writing for my college newspaper, I found myself covering the landfall of hurricane Katrina (from afar). The story, the focus of the front page, quoted speculation from experts that Katrina could be the most costly hurricane in United States history.

“Early estimates,” I wrote, “place costs upwards of $25 dollars.”

Go ahead, read that again. Indeed, it says that the natural disaster would cost no more than a Jackson and a Lincoln.

If we had more room in our header areas, I'd tack "for you" onto the end—that's one of the crucial points of this post, after all. In the course of doing what I do, I come across all kinds of email templates, and one truth emerges: the perfect email template is what works best for your organization and your readers. There's no one-size-fits-all solution.

Finding your own sweet spot, however, can be challenging. And while I was fully prepared to dive into the research and present some high-falutin' scientific evidence for your edification, I figured show-and-tell might be more meaningful. Let's take a look at some examples—two created by Digett, one not—that work.

Ed. Note: Learn how to theme the comment form in Drupal 7.

I’ve grown to have an affinity for Drupal’s hook_form_alter function. Truly, modifying a form doesn’t have to be as complicated as it may seem. One of the most generic Drupal forms (in my opinion) is the pesky comment form. Out of the box, it comes complete with name, email, homepage, subject, and comment fields.

Information Architecture has always been an important part of website design; if a website is too difficult to navigate, users are unlikely to stick around. It is the IA’s job to think like a user and structure the website accordingly. IAs sometimes operate as graphic designers and often are responsible for SEO (search engine optimization), thus contributing to a rather unwieldy job description. But until relatively recently, the job of Information Architect has remained relatively stable. As the saying goes, however, the only thing that remains constant is change.

I like to think that I was a librarian in another life. Although the strict organization of every single item (heaven!) would have been a perk, the best part of such a job would be all the instances in which I could match up a reader with the perfect book—all the times I could see people’s imaginations come to life because of stories that I found for them.

Yet if you asked me what my dream job would be (and as a recent college grad, I’ve been getting that question a lot lately), I would tell you “storyteller.”