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18 Comments

1. Paul Jennings
   October 28, 2010 1:22am

   WOW! Nice move on Campaign Monitor + XHTMLized!

   XHTMLized are the greatest when it comes to front-end development!

2. Luís Fonseca
   October 28, 2010 1:29am

   Really nice!

   Here’s a great collaboration, two of the best in the industry!

3. Paul Osborne
   October 28, 2010 2:37am

   x-team are awesome. Good move.

4. Tamara Brooks
   October 28, 2010 4:49am

   Agreed. Cheers to two powerhouses working together. :)

5. Irvin S
   October 29, 2010 5:50pm

   CM is a staple newsletter platform of design and development communities and agencies such as ourselves who already perform these tasks for our clients.

   It seems an odd choice to stick it to agencies who fit the following profile:

   “Happy enough with your product not to rebrand but to call what they offer ‘Campaign Monitor’ and not to make a profit on anything but the hourly work they do on templates”

   I know of five agencies in Sydney alone who do this…

   While it’s good that you’re playing catchup in a big way with default templates (the old ones were kinda ugly), creating an uneven playing field for the agencies who use you is a great way to get them to use MailChimp instead.

6. Rob
   October 29, 2010 9:06pm

   Have to agree with Irvin S, thanks again Campaign Monitor for shooting us in the foot, another good reason for my clients not to need my services. No room for mark up on the service and now it seems your attacking the other place we can make a bit of money. Bring out new templates and also promote one business to do template design at the same time! I’m sure we won’t be the only company you’ve just kicked in the head. Thanks.

7. David Greiner
   October 29, 2010 10:27pm

   

   Irvin and Rob, thanks for chiming in. I wanted to jump in and try and explain the idea behind the templates and a partnership like this.

   The most important thing I wanted to make clear is that the free templates are built by designers for other designers. Sometimes people need a starting point to get the creative juices flowing, or a good, well tested code base to build on. The templates make that job easy, but you’ll still need to know HTML and have Photoshop to get anything out of them.

   It was never our motivation to cut into your design services you offer your clients, we just wanted to make this job as easy for you as possible.

   As for the XHTMLized partnership, again, we’re not promoting this to anyone else but direct Campaign Monitor customers (designers) through the blog and newsletter. It’s never mentioned to your clients or promoted anywhere in the app where they might stumble across it. Again, this was all about making your job easier. If you’ve built a great design but can’t get it working in Gmail or Outlook, or don’t have time to try, this sort of service is at least an option for you to consider.

   This was the motivation that started this partnership in the first place. Admittedly, the concept and design service was something added at their end later, and I can see the cross-over there that lead to this frustration.

   The last thing we’d ever want to do is step on designers toes or make it harder to offer email marketing to your clients. Everything about these projects was to try and make your job a little easier.

8. Matt
   October 30, 2010 1:06am

   The templates are actually fine. But I would have to agree with Rob and Irvin when it comes to xhtmlized. This will surely have an adverse effect on our business. Your partnership with them gives them an unfair advantage boost over everyone else who does the same thing. Why the hell would potential clients go anywhere else when they have xhtmlized who’s getting your full blown recommendation and a discount to boot!

   I’m pretty sure your customers are made up of both coders and designers and xhtmlized provides both coding and design services (oh and copywriting too!). You’ll certainly be making our job easier because after this, the number of potential projects we’d be handling would really decline.

9. Brian Thies
   October 30, 2010 2:08am

   This was a poor choice of compensation.

   I’m agreeing on this one - promoting xhtmlized overlaps the services that your users are currently providing.  Whether they need design, coding, or both, you’re creating a situation where your current customers will lose business.  We all get paid to make the lives of others easier - all you’re doing is driving potential clients to one company.  (How is that making it easier on us???)

   The description on the newsletter and on the landing page is in DIRECT COMPETITION to services we offer.  You’re advertising for them.  Period.  If they wanted to promote their company, there’s a section in the forum setup to do so.

   I’ll leave you with this: I found a number of coding issues within several of the templates I looked at.  They also charge 3x for the same service.

   Good luck!

10. David Greiner
    October 30, 2010 2:43am

    

    Thanks for your comments guys, we understand your concerns. We certainly are not trying to compete or take business away from you though I can see it looks bad and it is fair to ask the question.

    Please rest assured that we will not be promoting this option above anyone else in order to cut you guys out. I know we’ve recommended Brian’s services to people in the past and will continue to do so, and we also feature different designers in our gallery, and in our case studies.

    This is just another option we offer to the people who have already discovered Campaign Monitor and come direct to us, and another option for our existing customers to integrate into their own business.

    Helping all of you build up your business is hugely important to us, and we’ve got plenty more resources and improvements on the way. Please don’t think that we’re trying to steal any work away from you, it is not the intention and I trust you’ll find that it does not result from this.

    If you have any other feedback, please get in touch and we can discuss it in detail.

11. John S.
    October 30, 2010 3:54am

    -1 for promoting a company that is competing with majority of your customers
    -1000 for providing templates that look like they haven’t even been tested.

    Seriously, I just checked a couple of those randomly and most of them had errors or wasn’t even adhering to the design specs. For $350 I would expect quality work.

    Take for instance Veerle Pieters textile design, that’s one gorgeous design. When I open it up on a web browser (take note a WEB BROWSER), that design didn’t look right.

    - full width template isn’t even complete - where’s the other post at?
    - why is the header area breaking up like that? Even if the text is too long that shouldn’t be happening at all
    - the bullet list are all done wrong - border should have been at the bottom and should have extended until the end.
    - footer text should have been left aligned

    Another thing, the files within the html folders still have tags in them. I was expecting just html with no tags as there is a separate folder for html with cm tags.

    Check out Veerle Pieters brace template too. The output looks horrible. That doesn’t do justice to the design.

    Did you even check these templates?? I’m now wondering how your templates will look on emails. Please check your templates before making them available for everyone. Those are not the type of work I would certainly pay $350 for even with a 20% discount. There are other email coders who do far better than this and for half the price.

12. Mathew Patterson
    October 30, 2010 4:14am

    John,

    Thanks for the feedback. Some of the issues you mention are to do with viewing the templates in a browser - they are built to be imported into Campaign Monitor (either as complete pages, or with the Campaign Monitor template tags as editable templates).

    So they don’t look exactly right until imported into your account, where the tags are parsed and content is added.

    Other items you mention are fair, for example the footer text is left aligned in Vierle’s PSD but was missed in the HTML. We’ll take a look at that and sort it out.

    I don’t think your aggregate score of -999 is a fair reflection of the end result of us giving you 100 free email templates though.

13. John S.
    October 30, 2010 4:41am

    Matthew, the only thing that involved the unparsed tags is the header problem.
    The rest were just very SIMPLE things that were clearly overlooked.

    Take a look at the Brace template and see how big the discrepancy is between the original template and the coded version. I’m sure you’ll see it right away.

    The score was only for sarcasm of course, the designs are absolutely wonderful but the lack of detail in putting those designs into life is unacceptable. And if you’re promoting a company that claims to be an expert in coding with claims such as these—Your design is coded into an e-mail template with meticulous precision—I would of course expect these templates to be coded perfectly.

    Again, I love the designs and the fact that you have provided them for free, but maybe you should have checked the templates first or have the individual designers check the templates before posting them here. The designers obviously put a lot of thought and effort in their designs, it should have been rewarded with pixel-perfect coding.

14. Mathew Patterson
    October 30, 2010 4:55am

    I take your point, and when we find these problems we will go back and fix them up certainly.

    As I am sure you know, when you’ve spent many hours looking at the same code or design, things can get missed. I know for a certainty there was a ton of back and forth getting these done, so it wasn’t as if they were not checked at all.

    Clearly they are not yet perfect in every case, but in the mean time you’ve also got the original PSD and the HTML there to work from and modify to your own needs.

    Thanks again.

15. Rob
    October 30, 2010 5:08pm

    I can tell you that I’ve a customer who I’ve been providing this service to and they decided about 2 months ago that I was too expensive to use by comparison to MailChamp and others, including CM. I’m currently not making any mark up on the sending because they had already found Campaign Monitor and wanted to know how come I was charging more for the exact same service, or as they said “we can get it cheaper if we sign up ourselves”. There goes that very small bit of profit but I was still making something on email templates for them. BTW they signed up to see was it the same service you were offering so they got the newsletter telling them about the fantastic 100 email templates and they have downloaded and emailed me saying all they need me to do is put insert their logo and add their company details where relevant and they are good to go for the foreseeable future! Also, because I’m not making the templates myself surely the cost would be minimal - if it isn’t then their IT guy will look at it for them. I’m just glad I’ve been able to do my bit to help Campaign Monitor on its rise to the top. It’s not the first time I’ve pointed out Campaign Monitor were creating a situation where they are competing to get our clients while saying they are providing a service to coders/designers.

    As David Greiner said earlier:
    “The most important thing I wanted to make clear is that the free templates are built by designers for other designers.” or

    “As for the XHTMLized partnership, again, we’re not promoting this to anyone else but direct Campaign Monitor customers (designers) through the blog and newsletter. It’s never mentioned to your clients or promoted anywhere in the app where they might stumble across it.”

    But you are promoting it to all users regardless of whether they are designers/coders just like your pricing is the exact same for us as it would be if one of our clients who come across your service. We are being treated as sales staff for campaign monitor but without pay or commission. CM slogan could change to: “Bring us your business and we’ll gladly squeeze you out”.

    Years ago I worked for a graphic design business who had a list of printers we would use and we discovered that one of the printers were contacting our clients right after we would bring a job to print and telling them they had printed the job and hoped they were happy with it and in future any work they needed done, design or print make sure to contact them. A lot of the time they wouldn’t even charge for design because they would have to do it anyway to print the job!

    That relationship didn’t last very long. This is cutting very close to the same if you ask me.

    Now I’m not just competing with Campaign Monitor but also their “partner”. Thanks again. I’ll be out of contact for the next few minutes… I need to get my website to just redirect to Campaign Monitors, I’ll be rich in a very short time - should save a fortune on advertising.

16. Dave Rosen
    October 30, 2010 7:52pm

    We’ve read your responses and we understand your complaints, but rest assured the situation is not nearly as ominous as you’ve imagined.

    The vast majority of our clients are other designers like yourselves that understand what we mean if we say cross-browser compatible semantic W3C Valid XHTML. By taking care of tasks - such as making sure a design works MS Outlook 2003 - we’re enabling people to focus on the areas they love. Naturally, we have the occasional small business ask for our help, but by and large we are not competing against you in the open marketplace. In fact, we’d love to be working WITH you to help both our agencies grow and prosper, like we do with so many other designers.

    We think it’s unfair for Campaign Monitor to have been maligned for abandoning smaller businesses, as that is simply not the case. This partnership is all about delivering excellent service to customers by adding incredible value to an already excellent product; it’s certainly not intended to shove anyone else out of the picture. We’re here to help agencies that want it, and we’re proud to be in the company of great designers and programmers such as yourselves.

    Thank you everyone, and thank you Campaign Monitor!

17. Brian Thies
    October 30, 2010 10:34pm

    @ Dave Rosen

    You are directly competing against the services I (and many others) offer.

    I’m a designer and a coder.  Majority (80-90%) of my work is coding emails for other designers and ensuring they’re compatible with today’s email clients.  I love the service I provide, and have found many designers needing my services from the forums.

    The value you’re “adding” was already being provided by others - with your company now being pushed to the forefront and promoted in a way that makes it unfair to CM customers providing the same services.

    Intentions and results are two different things…

18. Richard@FM
    November 27, 2010 11:15am

    I agree entirely with Brian. I was pointed back to this after I commented similarly on templates within the forums.

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