The Fun Friday Roundup 14th May 2010

May 13, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist Leave a Comment

What we’ve done in work

  • Configured & launched a Sharepoint intranet
  • Customised a WordPress search results template
  • Built a WordPress site for a new client
  • Simon gave Chris the nickname of ‘GA Baracus’ and threatened to make a logo for it…
  • Updating around 40 live sites for clients
  • Put out 5 quotes for new website builds and redesigns
  • Started upgrading sites to Drupal 6
  • Built lots of presentations using PPT’s and audio files using SlideShare
  • Setting up a new Support Web system in Cold Fusion
  • Planning A/B website call to actions testing for a client
  • Built a TON of web banners!
  • Remote client training for CMS

What we’ve done out of work

  • Sev has been singing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Oh Happy Day” in gospel choir rehearsals. Planning wedding music.
  • Alex went to watch Arsenal beat Fulham 4-0, started running again and going to the gym
  • Matt put The Plump DJs on in Oxford, finally got a dongle for his laptop and booked a holiday! Yay
  • Simon has been practicing with Screeching Weasel. Flying to Canada. Getting hit with a large bar tab for drinks he thought were complimentary in the hotel.
  • Chris has been getting a tattoo finished, loading up his iPhone with tunes using Spotify Premium and been to the gym 5 times :o

Stuff we discovered this week

Have you seriously got nothing better to do than reading this rubbish?? :D

Filed Under: Blog

Go Daddy's EU Hosting is Useless for Multiple WordPress Sites

May 13, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist 6 Comments

If you’re looking for a UK or EU based solution for hosting multiple WordPress sites then save yourself a huge headache and avoid Go Daddy’s new EU hosting plan.

The 2 major problems:

  1. The multiple locations, random selection, unwanted site migration and undisclosable details of the EU Data Centres
  2. The preview DNS functionality for domains you have not transferred to them

The Data Centers

Go Daddy have hosting set up in multiple datacenters dotted around Europe to support their EU expansion.

The problem is that you cannot choose which one your hosting account is allocated to. It’s chosen at random based on usage levels at the time of creation.

I created a plan and was assigned to one in Holland. This is useless for us hosting sites for UK based companies who have non country specific TLD’s and need the benefit of location based hosting to assist in their SERPs.

I asked to be moved to the UK datacentre instead and was told that customer services cannot manually decide where your account is allocated and they could not disclose whether there was even a data centre in the UK in their network.

Next problem, even if you get extremely lucky and do get hosted in a preferred location when you add a Secure Certificate to your site (you get one free with some plans) your account gets moved to another data centre which is again chosen randomly.

Even if you are not fussy about the actual location of the hosting and just want your sites to be faster for European visitors in general, your still going to have lots of fun…

The “Hosting” Account

Even though none of the 3 hosting plans are specifically designed to be used as reseller accounts they all offer multiple, if not unlimited, domains, ftp users, one click installs, etc just as you would expect.

Perfect for hosting multiple WordPress sites? No.

The fun begins when you create a new hosting account for a domain you have not yet transfered to Go Daddy, which if you’re building sites for a client with an existing site hosted elsewhere that has to stay live until you’ve finished development is going to happen regularly.

You set up your hosting for www.domain.com and install WordPress. Now you want to preview the site so you have to activate a Preview DNS function for the domain and you are given a temporary URL that you can use until you transfer the domain to Go Daddy.

The other problem is that WordPress creates the database relative to the domain you set the hosting up on. So when you view your site on preview.domain.com WordPress can’t find the files because it’s looking for them on www.domain.com .Which hasn’t been transferred yet. And you can’t use the preview domain in WordPress because it doesn’t really exist and can’t be created prior to creating the hosting account…

The other problem is that even if you figure out a solution to the above, Javascript and Flash are not supported on the preview domain for security. How much fun will it be trying to preview your site without at least Javascript working given most plugins rely on it to work?

Has anyone else encountered this problem? Did you find a workaround or did you give up? Who did you choose instead?

Filed Under: Blog

The Fun Friday Roundup 7th May 2010

May 6, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist Leave a Comment

What we’ve done in work

  • Advertising for a new HTML developer and Word Press developer
  • Lots of office hunting
  • Migrating existing Blogger blogs to www.dotnetblogengine.net due to Google switching off the Blogger FTP service.
  • Tinkering with SlideShare
  • Completing 2 large Word Press projects and starting another
  • Designing about 1 million web banners
  • Integrating a site we built with a 3rd party CRM
  • In depth SEO analysis of a site for a new client
  • Updating around 60 live sites for clients
  • Creating a daily csv export of user data for a company in Oxford

What we’ve done out of work

  • Sev has been wedding-menu tasting – yum :) and  5-a-side football for the first time in weeks – ouch :|
  • Alex has been going to the gym, playing 5-a-side and voting
  • Matt staged the 1st Slide boat party of the summer on bank holiday Sunday – a sell out success!
  • Simon has started practice for the last set of gigs he will be doing with Screeching Weasel and the Riverdales.
  • Chris has been learning new silat flow drills in TaeKwon-Do
  • Jon has been keeping up with the election news and learning a Hungarian rhapsody

Stuff we discovered this week

  • Visual Studio 2010 intellisense can automatically fill out switch-case statements when writing code
  • Coldfusion 9 can store code in memory to be run later in the program
  • Go Daddy has a hosting plans available in their new EU datacentre

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Book Review: Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk

May 3, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist Leave a Comment

Crush It Gary VaynerchukJust finished reading Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk.

About the author. Gary is, self admittedly, a love or hate type of character. He’s got a big personality, he’s very blunt and extremely passionate.

This is instantly recogniseable if you watch his interviews, keynote talks and online communication channel, Wine Library TV.

I can understand why some people might find him hard to watch. He swears quite a lot, if wine tastes like vomit he says it does and I can imagine a lot of people thinking he’s over the top and arrogant.

Personally I don’t mind swearing, I’d rather he told me that wine tasted like vomit before it cost me £27 to find out for myself and I think he’s just confident and doesn’t feel the need to waste his life trying to convince people it isn’t arrogance instead of doing more of what he loves most.

Love him or hate him you can’t argue with the fact that he’s passionate, honest, and extremely successful - by his own definition of how to measure it.

In the book he emphasises why it’s so important to develop a personal brand and gives you a blue print for achieving it online using social media and networking tools. He also promotes a lot of good values to instill into your business and personal life such as loving your family being your number 1 priority in how to be successful and being honest and transparent with your customers no matter what it costs you.

His drive to find and embrace his passion is a reflection of Donald Trump’s attitude to business/life and the result is an inspiring message of success can be acheived by everyone who takes the time out to explore and find their passion and pursue it without being scared of the journey without trying to disguise how easily it can be acheived without hard work, long hours and a lot of patience.

The book is an insight into what he thinks is in store for those who shy away from creating a personal brand and ignoring the inevitabilites that the internet will have on business as a whole rather than just the corporate world.

You won’t get much detail on how to implement anything he outlines in the book which might frustrate some readers whoare  already very familiar with the internet and use all the most popular social networking tools already such as twitter and facebook but it’s still worth a read if for nothing else than Gary’s refreshing approach to business, life and being true to yourself without being ashamed or trying to change who you are and what you love – your DNA as he calls it.

It’s a nice set of beliefs to have and very satisfying to see how he’s applied it to his own life with unquestionable success and even if the implementation of his advice doesn’t give you much to think about the philosophy behind it most likely will and the positive message he is spreading will be infectious and inspiring for a lot of readers.

The book is a pretty quick read at less than 150 pages and because of the lack of detail on how to implement the strategy it’s quite easy to hammer through without too much concentration. At less than £10 it’s definately worth the money because of it’s message if not the blueprint and techniques which you may already be familiar with if you are an experienced blogger or internet marketer.

I prefer to read books when theirs details to refer back to but I don’t think i’d ever re-read this so I would have preferred the audio book instead seeing as I quite enjoy Gary’s style of delivery (I’m assuming he would have narrated it himself).

For me it’s not a keeper for the reference shelf but i’ll definately pass it on to a few people I know will really enjoy it and might spot an opportunity to cash in on their passion.

Have you read it already, what did you think?

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How to Track Offline Marketing Campaigns in Google Analytics

April 30, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist Leave a Comment
Check out this article if you want to know: How to Use the Google Analytics URL Builder

If you are already familiary with creating your tracking links and want to track offline marketing campaigns in Google Analytics you have 2 choices.

Given that the tracking links are long and ugly and completely unsuitable for advertising you will still create your tracking link as standard and then you can either:

  1. Use a URL shortning tool
  2. Use a nice looking url using your own domain


If you use a shortning tool, like bit.ly, is.gd, goo.gl etc then your tracking link parameters will still be passed to GA successfully.

This might be fine if you are just doing a promotion on twitter or another social networking site but if you want to use a tracking link in your printed or more coporate communications you should probably create your own using your branded domain.

To do this you will need to choose a nice looking, unique URL which is also relevant for your campaign, so:

yourdomain.com/offer
yourdomain.com/tv
yourdomain.com/100
yourdomain.com/radio
yourdomain.com/xmas
etc

Then you will 301 redirect your nice url to the tracking link which you generated. This means people get to type in a short and memorable URL and you can still identify which marketing effort they came from.

301 redirects can be done at page or server level so either way you will need to get your IT team or web guys to set it up for you unless you are comfortable tackling this yourself.

There’s always the chance that someone will post your nice url somewhere on the internet which could mean that it pollutes your true figures. But good old GA can filter those out easily by checking which of your campaign visits were from referring URL’s.

The people who typed your promotional link directly into their browsers won’t have a referring site associated with them whereas the visitors who clicked the nice URL they found on a site will.

If you found this helpful please let us know…

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How to Use the Google Analytics URL Builder

April 29, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist 1 Comment

If you already appreciate Why You Should Use the Google Analytics URL Builder then below is a short guide on how to use and some things to consider about it’s application.

If you have a look at the Google Analytics URL Builder page you’ll see it’s very simple to use.

Enter the url of your site that you will be directing people to, enter your tracking terms in the fields underneath (only 3 are required) and then click the ‘Generate URL’ button.

Now you just copy the tracking code which appears in the box underneath and use that in your marketing campaign. You don’t need to do anything in GA itself. Just start using the link. Simple!

Here are some things you might find useful for tracking marketing campaigns:

  1. Don’t use this tool to track your Adwords campaigns. Instead login to your Adwords account and enable auto tagging which will do it for you.

  2. You will only need to use the Campaign Content field if you want to track various links within a single marketing campaign. For example if you have a mailshot with 1 call to action near the top and another near the bottom then you can use the same tracking link but each with a different Campaign Content term to determine which of the links the visitor used but still tag them all from the same campaign, source and medium.

  3. The campaign name, campaign source and campaign medium and are required fields.

  4. Think of a campaign name being the umbrella term used for a marketing campaign such as Christmas Offer or Valentines Promotion. Within your campaigns you can have lots of sources and mediums.By grouping all your sources and mediums under an umbrella campaign name you can easily glance at a single lined report and see what that campaign acheived for you overall before delving into the details.

    Example: You spend £5k promoting a special offer. You glance at your campaign overview report and see it generated 1500 sales, 400 mailing list subscriptions and 200 enquiries. Regardless of where the traffic came from you can decide immediately if the campaign was successfull.

    Tips: Don’t use the same campaign name for different campaigns even if they promote the same thing: for example the same offer but a month later. Differentiate it using the month you run it for example or you will get data from the campaigns polluting each other.

  5. Your campaign sources are the places or channels you used in your overall campaign. These could be the sites you advertised on, the names of the companies you used to push our your promotion, the name of the mailing lists you used and so on.

    Example continued from above:So you know how much you spent on your campaign and how much it generated for you. By drilling one level deeper into your campaign report you will see a list of the campaign sources down the left hand side of the screen and then a breakdown of the sales, mailing list supbscriptions and enquiries that each source generated for you.

    Tips: Keep your source names consistent across all your campaigns. If I advertise on a certain website for every campaign that I do and I always refer to them using the same source name then at the end of the year I can pull up a report showing sales, subscriptions and enquiries across all my campaigns for that source and easily compare it with how much I spent which them that year. This saves you adding up their value from 12 different reports. Not a huge job if you only have 1 source you use but a big deal when you have 2000 marketing channels!

  6. Your campaign mediums are a way to keep track of the type of advertising you did within your campaigns and various sources. These would be things like email, website banner, rss banner, print advert and so on.

    Example continued from above:You might advertise with a partnering company (campaign source) but they place a banner on their site, an advert in their monthly electronic newsletter and an advert in their printed office bulletin. You will now be able to drill into your sources to see which mediums they used worked and which didn’t.You might see that overall a source was great but by seeing which sources worked and which didn’t you can reallocate your spending with them.

    Tips: Keep your medium names easily recognisable. For example if you start using email1, email2, email3 etc as your naming convention you will never remeber which email you sent out was which within GA. Keep your medium names consistent across your campaigns so that if you ever need to you can pull up a report of all your campaigns and filter the results by medium to find for example how much email marketing contributed to the overall campaign results.

  7. Don’t become lazy and only track some of your marketing. All you will end up with is a GA account you can’t rely on for accurate reporting leading to inaccurate decision making. Generating links is quick and easy.

Please let us know if this guide has helped you. Was there anything you found confusing about the name, source and medium tags when you starting tracking your links? How helpful have you found the reports they provided you with?

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Why You Should Use the Google Analytics URL Builder

April 29, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist Leave a Comment

In our post about the key Google Analytics essentials we mentioned tracking your traffic using the Google Analytics URL Builder (also sometimes called the Google URL Tool) being one of them.

In it’s simplest form the tool generates links that enable you to track which on and off line marketing campaigns your visitors have come from and as a consequence what they do on your site.

There are a number of reasons for tracking your visitors this way and they apply to the majority of website owners and web agencies who wish to produce value rich reports.

  1. To give you insight into your marketing efforts and deeper user insight
    By using tracking links in your on and offline marketing you will be able to measure each of your marketing efforts in GA on a number of different levels.You can easily segment and filter the traffic from your different marketing campaigns, sources and mediums (how to do this effectively is explained in the follow on post) so regardless of what Key Performace Indicators (KPI’s) you use to measure your site’s ‘success’ you can compare specific marketing efforts against your KPI’s really easily.Obviously being able to segment your different marketing campaign traffic in your reports is absolutely crucial.

    If you can’t then you will never know which specific marketing campaigns or efforts:

    Produced good outcomes (traffic, leads, signups, customers, refer a friends, etc)
    Produced bad outcomes (no traffic, unsubscribes, negative feedback, complaints, etc)

    Example:
    You send out 5 different promotional emails today to 5 different mailing lists. Your mailing list software shows you the read count and even how many people clicked your ‘Find out more’ link in your email.

    GA reports that on that day you received 1000 visitors, 200 unsubscribes, 200 contact leads and 200 sales.

    But you have no way to tell which mailshot sent the good traffic and which sent the bad. You can’t even begin to figure out which mailing list was worth buying and which wasn’t and/or which email format worked if you sent out 5 completely different versions.

    Instead, imagine being able to quickly glance at a single report in GA which shows for each mailshot that you sent out: the traffic, unsubscribes, contact leads, sales generated and bounce rate. Your report would look like this:

    why you should use the google analytics url builder

    Sound good? If it doesn’t to you then it will to your marketing manager and CFO.

  2. Don’t pollute your direct traffic count
    If you send out promotion emails and you don’t use tracking links then GA has no way of knowing where that traffic came from. As a result the traffic will be categorised as direct traffic.This is not helpful, for example, if you are trying to build up a loyal readership and so you are monitoring your direct traffic volume as an indication of returning visitors who have bookmarked the site or type in your URL directly into their browsers each time they return to the site.As with everything analytics, you might not care about this data right now but you might in the future so avoid the frustration and futureproof your direct traffic data now.
  3. Don’t rely on ‘referring sites’ to measure your advertising
    GA tracks which sites your visitors come from by default so you don’t need to add tracking to links from other websites. The problem arises if you are advertising on a site and there are also other links to you on their site.In this situation, without tracking, you would have no way to tell whether a user who had visited from that site had clicked on your advert or on a link somewhere else on the site.Given that a site could already link to you without you knowing or link to you in the future you should always use tracking links for web banners you distribute.

You can read more about how to use the URL tool in the next post: How to Use the Google Analytics URL Builder

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5 Google Analytics Essentials

April 27, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist Leave a Comment

Lots of people are (sensibly) using Google Analytics (GA) these days.

It’s free, packed with an ever expanding incredible feature list and as easy to install on your site as could be made possible.

The problem a lot of the time is that companies know they should be collecting data but beyond that are unaware of any configuration being necessary or exactly how they will use the data they collect in the future.

Now, not knowing which data that they collect is going to be the most useful to them in the future or knowing how they and other stakeholders will want that information presented to them doesn’t matter one bit. Reports can be produced or changed retrospectively. They are purely a way of presenting the data that’s been collected in a format most useful to the recipient.

The problem arises when the data hasn’t been collected properly in the first place. Simply adding GA code to your site is not enough.

Most companies who rely on an external web agency won’t realise that in order to view valuable reports in the future, reports which will enable them to make informed decision making about so much more than just their websites, their must be settings put in place in advance of collecting that data. Settings which cannot be applied retrospectively!

If your data is not filtered correctly as it’s collected then you are going to have big problems being able to interpret it accurately, if at all, down the road.

So if you are a company who uses an external web agency or you have in house developers who maybe have a limited knowledge of GA then make sure you check with them that these steps have been taken. Not getting them right could mean all your reports being worthless and the decisions you make based on those reports being completely wrong for your business even if your interpretation of the data is correct because it’s polluted.

Here are 5 Google analytics essentials that you should make sure are configured correctly in your account:

  1. Filters

    Your data must be filtered as it’s collected to prevent collecting data that you do not want being gathered as well as making sure the data that you do want is correctly identified.You cannot go back and retrospectively apply filters to data which has already been collected.

    An example of polluting your data would be allowing visits to your website from your own staff and web teams to be collected and the activities they performed whilst reviewing and updating the site to appear in the reports along with real user data. Visits from certain locations can easily be filtered out of your reports by excluding certain IP addresses.An example of correctly identifying data would be to ensure that you are able to easily identify which subdomain a user visists resides on.

    By default Google Analytics only displays the name of the page a person visited in it’s reports so if you have multiple subdomains you wouldn’t easily know whether a person had visited http://a.domain.com/page or http://b.domain.com/page as both would just appear as /page in your reports. A filter can be applied to display the subdomains in the reports making life much easier.

  2. Goals

    Every website has a goal(s). Whether it’s getting people to visit a certain page, perform a certain activity, view x number of pages on their visit or stay on the site for a certain period of time and a website’s success can in it’s most simple form be determined by monitoring and measuring your goal success.

    Goals relating to time on site and depth of visit (pages viewed) can be easily reported from the data Google Analytics automatically collects. However if your goals involve an activity being performed such as the number of times a form is successfully completed you will need to setup goals in your GA profile.

    For example, if you want to know how many contact enquiries you received through your site’s contact form and you haven’t set it up correctly as a goal with a unique thank you page then you would have to manually add the number of enquires you received up. But you wouldn’t know the useful stuff like how they found your site, what they did on the site prior to contacting you and what prompted their enquiry.

  3. Link your Adwords account

    If you don’t link your Adwords account to your Analytics account then you will not be able to identify which keywords  in your reports were paid ones which generated the visit via a PPC advert and those which results in a successful organic listing.

    You also will not be able to identify via your analytics reports which of your PPC keywords and adverts resulted in successfull goals and instead you would need to do it via your Adwords interface and add additional code to your site giving you twice as much work and half as flexible reporting.

  4. Track on and offline marketing campaigns

    You can easily track your on and offline marketing campaigns using the Google URL Builder.

    Obviously it’s invaluable to see which of your marketing efforts are working on the site. The URL builder will generate tracking links which you can use on your online marketing campaigns such as mailshots and advertising banners. The traffic which comes from these tracking links will automatically be tagged in your GA reports so you can see which campaigns worked and which didn’t in your goal reports.

    The tracking links are long and ugly and whilst you can hide them easily in your online markting you wouldn’t want to put a long horrible url full of variables and symbols on a print advert for example. You can easily get round this by redirecting a nice url such as domain.com/offer to your tracking link so you can measure the success of your offline marketing too in GA.

  5. Have master profiles as well as segmented accounts

    It’s great to have different profiles to monitor different sections of your site.

    You might want to have a seperate profile for each subdomain you have or to have profiles set up for subdirectories on your site you want to easily view reports on in isolation such as http://blog.domain.com/ or http://www.domain.com/blog/It’s also a good idea to keep a master profile which accumulates all the data together even you can’t envisage a need for it in the future.

    You currently can’t combine the data from different profiles in GA so do yourself a huge favour and have a mster profile just in case you ever do want it. Maybe you will get a chance to advertise across all sections of your site or want to pull up a report of all user demographics.If you never need it then you’ve wasted 10 minutes setting the profiles up. If you ever do it will be the best 10 minutes you’ve invested.

If this has helped you then please let us know using the comments area below and please share with as many people as possible incase it can help them too.

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How to Make Windows Live Mail the Ultimate Gmail IMAP Client

April 24, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist 12 Comments

Below are step by step instructions on how to setup Windows Live Mail to be the ultimate Gmail IMAP client.

There are 15 steps in total and shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to complete.

Using these settings in Windows Live Mail (WLM) will give you an amazing IMAP configuration that’s fast, reliable and easy to use.

If you are currently unsure which client you want to use then check out this post on why Windows Live Mail (WLM) is the best IMAP client to use with Gmail.

Windows live mail is free and can be downloaded here.

Once you have installed the programme and run it for the first time work through this setup list in order:


Step 1. In the top right corner of the application you will see an icon of a small arrow on a white and blue drop down menu. Click it and then select the bottom option, ‘Show Menu Bar’

windows-live-mail-gmail-imap-setup-screen-1

Step 2. In the top menu click View > Layout. A nice view to work with is:

Reading Pane: Show the reading pane; to the right of the message list
Message List: One-Line view
Folder Pane: Only check the Use Companct Shortcuts option
Message header (Mail): Check the show message header box

windows-live-mail-gmail-imap-setup-screen-2

Click Apply then OK.

Step 3. In the top menu click Tools > Options. Now work through the various tabs:

General & Read
All of the options here are just down to your own preferences and won’t effect your IMAP experience.

Receipts
Under the ‘Returning Read Receipts’ section, check ‘Never send a read receipt’.

Send
MAKE SURE you UNCHECK the ‘Save copy of sent messages in the’ Sent Items’ folder’. Gmail automatically saves a copy of sent mail anyway meaning you end up with 2 copies if you leave this checked.

Compose
Click Font Settings and pick your font, font style and font size of choice.

Signatures
If you would like to use a signature then click New and then click Rename then enter a name for your signature. Check the ‘add signatures to all outgoing messages’ box at the top and leave the ‘Don’t add signatures to Replies and Forwards’ checked.

Either enter some text for your signature or check the File button and the browse your local machine and select your signature file if you have prepared one.

Spelling
Choose your language and click ‘Set Default’

Connection & Advanced
The default settings are fine on both

Step 4. Now we need to configure Gmail. Login to your Gmail account online.

Once you are logged in go to Settings > Labs and then click enable beside Advanced IMAP Controls.

windows-live-mail-gmail-imap-setup-screen-3

Step 5. Now jump to the ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’ tab.

Alongside IMAP Access click the enable IMAP option.

windows-live-mail-gmail-imap-setup-screen-4

Step 6. Jump to the ‘Labels’ tab.

In the System labels section make sure the following boxes are unchecked: All Mail, Spam and Trash.

windows-live-mail-gmail-imap-setup-screen-5

Step 7. Now you can set up your account in WLM. Go to Tools > Accounts > Add.

On the next screen choose Email Account.

Step 8. Enter your email address, password and display name and then check the manually configure box.

windows-live-mail-gmail-imap-setup-screen-6

Step 9. Select IMAP as your incoming server, type imap.gmail.com into the incoming server box and then check ‘This server requires a secure conneciton’ box.

The incoming port should default to 993. If it doesn’t then set this manually.

Log on using clear authentication. Your Login ID is your full email address rather than just the part before the @ which will appear by default in the box.

Enter smpt.gmail.com into the outgoing server box and check both boxes underneath; ‘This server requires a secure conneciton’ and ‘My outgoing server requires authentication’.

Now change the outgoing port to 587. Click Next

windows-live-mail-gmail-imap-setup-screen-7

Step 10. You will get a message saying you have successfully entered your account information and you will see your new account in the accouns window. Click Close

Step 11. Your IMAP folder list will be automatically downloaded and you will see them appear in the Show/Hide IMAP Folders window which appears. Click OK.#

Step 12. Right click on your account name which will have appeared in the left hand side of the screen and then choose properties from the menu. If you prefer you can access the same details by going to Tools > Accounts > Select the account you created > Click Properties.

Click on the IMAP tab at the very right and enter the following information:

The root folder path is: [Gmail] including the square brackets
Check the box for ‘Check for new messages in all folders’
Check the box for ‘Store special folders on IMAP server’
The Sent Items path is: Sent Mail
The Drafts path is: Drafts
The Deleted Items path is: Deleted Items
The Junk Path is: Spam

Click Apply and then OK.

windows-live-mail-gmail-imap-setup-screen-8

Step 13. You will see a message telling you that your account has changed and would you like to update the folders list. Click yes.

Step 14. You will now see your Gmail ‘labels’ listed underneath your account on the left hand side without being contained in a [Gmail] drop down menu. If for any reason your list of labels  is not as you expected it to be then right click on your account name on the left of the screen, choose IMAP Folders and then click the Reset List button in the window which appears.

windows-live-mail-gmail-imap-setup-screen-9

Step 15. If you want to add additional columns into the message pane area, such as email size which doesn’t appear in the default column view then simply right click on the columns bar and choose Columns from the menu which appears.

You can then decide which columns you want to keep or appear by checking and unchecking the relevant boxes and rearrange the order using the move up and down buttons.

windows-live-mail-gmail-imap-setup-screen-10

And you’re done!

When you first go into your deleted items or sent mail folders there will be a lot of mail to download if you’ve been using your account for a while. WLM will only download the message headers for you though and not the attachements so it won’t take long.

If you want to add new folders for storing and organising your mail then just right click on your account name on the left of the screen and choose New Folder from the menu which appears.

Enter a name for your new folder and click ok. You might need to update your folder list to force the new folder to appear. The effect this will have in your actual gmail account will be to create a new label and any mail you place into that folder on your client will be tagged with that label in your Gmail account.

Adding a flag to a message in Windows Live Mail will add a star to it in your gmail account.

How do you find Windows Live Mail compared to Thunderbird and Outlook?

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The Best IMAP Client for Gmail is Windows Live Mail

April 23, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist 2 Comments

We use Gmail and it’s IMAP functionality for our emails and we also recommend it to our smaller clients who don’t use or have a need for an enterprise mail solution. Why? Because Gmail rocks.

NB: If you are looking for help setting up WLM you can view step by step instructions in the How to Make Windows Live Mail the Ultimate Gmail IMAP Client post.

Along with everyone else who uses IMAP we’ve tried just about every client out there in search of the perfect solution.

It’s an extremely frustrating process to work through the forum, tutorials and discussions of those who have tried before and peice together their guides in order to avoid encountering the nuances of each client that they discovered.

Before getting to the things about WLM that we love here’s why we just can’t use Thunderbird or Outlook:

Thunderbird

Thunderbird is a popular choice due to it being easy to setup, supporting multiple accounts and the number of plugins available.

The real fun begins when you want to style your emails and can’t choose a proper font size. Even in version 3… All you can do is pick small, medium and large rather than a point size which is incredibly annoying if you have a specific format you like to use for your emails.

Even more annoying is that although you can select the fonts to use for writing and replying to emails in the options, Thunderbird is quirky and often reverts back to it’s default font when you compose a new mail.

You might think compared to some IMAP clients that this is insignificant compared to their much bigger problems but just wait until you’ve had to restyle your 10th email by 9.10am on a Monday morning.

Outlook 2007

Outlook 2007 is pretty slow and clunky and it’s noticeable if you switch from another client which you’re used to being efficient. The biggest irritation though is that you cannot specify where deleted mail should go and so they automatically moved into your Gmail deleted items rather than the local Outlook folder.

This means if you just hit the delete key, which everyone does, the mail is moved to your local deleted items folder and the ‘inbox’ or other label is removed from the mail. It still exists in your ‘All mail’ folder in gmail but you can only see a list of your deleted emails on the machine you were at when you deleted them. Move to a new machine to do some work and you’ve no idea which of the emails in your ‘All Mail’ folder were deleted items.

You can get around this by dragging an email you are finished with into a Gmail folder rather than hitting the delete key or programming a series of macros and assinging them to a key on the keyboard but who could be bothered with either? You also can’t assign it to the delete key as it’s function is pre defined.

Outlook 2010 actually solves this problem and it does allow you to specify the path for your deleted mail including using a remote Gmail folder.

The problem which it still has though is that if you have multiple Gmail accounts set up you cannot drag mail from one account to the other and have to ‘forward’ an email from one address to another.

If you only use a single Gmail account in Outlook and the deleted mail path problem has annoyed you forever then download Outlook 2010 and you can breathe a sigh of releif.

Windows Live Mail

Windows live mail is free and can be downloaded here.

WLM doesn’t have the font problems which Thunderbird has and lets you choose your font, font style, colour and size just like in Outlook.

Each account’s properties panel has an IMAP tab allowing you to set the root folder path and let you choose the folders you want to use for deleted items, sent mail etc

You can set up multiple Gmail IMAP accounts and drag emails between the accounts from and to any folders you like. This is great if you have more than 1 email address you attend to.

It’s also very useful if you have a central email address that more than 1 person monitors such as a general ‘enquiries’ email account. Multiple people can monitor that inbox and just drag an item into their personal account when they come to deal with an enquiry.

WLM used to be pretty slow once you added multiple IMAP accounts due to the number of folders it had to synchronise but Google Labs released the Advanced IMAP Controls feature which lets you decide which IMAP folders even appear in your local client. This means you can choose not to sync big folders like the All Mail folder on your local machine making the client much faster. It’s also prevents the nasty timeouts and login warnings which used to happen a lot in WLM.

You can view your mailboxes by conversation if you like the threaded email view and whilst the interface layout isn’t as flexible as larger programmes such as Outlook there’s still enough options that you can create a working environment that you are familiar with such as choosing where the preview pane should be displayed if it all and how the message lists appear.

If it’s been a while since you tried WLM and you previously got frustrated at time outs then give it another try now that Advance IMAP controls are available and be amazed how nicely it runs.

You can view detailed instructions here on how to setup WLM to work with Gmail using IMAP including multiple accounts, signatures and more.

What client do you use for IMAP? What quirks make Monday mornings painful?

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