Tip of the Month Archive
Each month our subscribers receive a "tip of the month" in their emails that announce their monthly newsletter downloads. This page contains our most recent tips. Our purpose for this page is to make it convenient for new subscribers to easily review the tips that our older subscribers have received over the past few months.
We hope these tips are of benefit to you and your newsletter staff. As always, if you have any questions, just email me at rick@itsyournews.tv.
July 2006 Tip
Remember, all of our graphics are scalable. Most all of them will look fine no matter how you resize them. This means that you can get creative with your page layouts. For instance, say we have a color background graphic that covers an entire page but you want to put something on part of the page that would look better with a white background. Just resize our background graphic to where it only covers the part of the page you want it to. You could also cover up part of our background graphic with a white box. Also, you may feel free to use any of our custom graphics in any of your other publications. For instance, you could use one of our custom heading graphics in your newsletter and then again in your Sunday bulletin. This gives some consistency to your publications. You may remember a graphic that you didn’t use three months ago, but you want to use it now. Just open that old newsletter and copy and past the graphic to your current publication. Let the creative juices flow and enjoy.
June 2006 Tip
A frequent question we get is, “Can I email my newsletter?” or “Do you do an email version of your newsletter?” The answer is “YES” you can email your newsletter. Just print it to PDF when you’re finished. Then you can attach this PDF file to an email to send to your readers. This makes a very attractive email as it will look just like the printed version. Of course, your readers will need Acrobat Reader, but they can download that for free from the Adobe website. You might want to include download instructions in your email. There are advantages to email, such as: no printing costs, no mailing costs, and quick and easy updating. However, there are also disadvantages, such as: user must make the effort to retrieve the email and read it while seated at the computer; not everyone has email or uses the web; connection speed influences download times and amount of time spent online; can’t be read away from the computer, etc. A printed newsletter arrives at the home; there’s no hardware needed to read; it can be read away from the computer (in bed or bath or perused while watching TV; and it can be filed and shared with others. A good compromise might be to publish and mail your newsletter and supplement it with text only email updates. For more information go to our FAQ page on our website.
May 2006 Tip
Some “white” space is okay. By “white” space I mean blank space between columns or objects on your page. If your page looks too crowded it is confusing to the eye and discourages readers. The human eye likes to see order not disorder, especially with regard to text intensive content. The eye really needs the relief that is provided by the white spaces. Remember that the graphics we provide and usually the graphics you get from other sources are completely scalable. This means you do not have to just except them at their original size. You can resize them to fit your page layout. By doing this you can ensure that there is enough “white” space between the objects that make up your page content. Research has shown that there are three types of readers. Those who start at the upper right and look at the page from left to right and then down, those who start just above the page center and begin to look out from there, and those who start at the upper left and look down-across– and up in a U shape. This is the process their eyes follow as they look for something to catch their attention and then read. Keep these three types of readers in mind and always provide enough white space and your page layouts will wow your readers.
April 2006 Tip
Don’t forget to keep the NEWS in your newsletter. Your newsletter should not be just about promoting future events. People really enjoy reading news about what other groups are doing and human interest stories about other people in the church. The next time a group is doing something special, just ask one of the participants to write you a short summary of their experience and maybe even take a picture of some part of the event for you. When you hear of someone who has an inspiring testimony ask them to put it in writing for you and take their picture to go with the story. Be sure and include all age groups. For instance, the seniors would enjoy reading a story written by one of the kids in the youth group, even if it’s just about what they did or learned in the last youth service. Don’t underestimate the power of simple stories to captivate your readers. What makes these stories interesting is that the readers know the people in the story, or if they don’t know them, it helps them to get to know others in the church. This is a great way to foster unity in the body. Remember, don’t underestimate the power of simple and short stories. Your readership is about to increase, just wait and see.
March 2006 Tip
A good understanding of working with columns is important for newsletter page layout. It’s also easy in Publisher. First draw a text box for your first column. Then you can copy and paste another column the same size. To control the exact sizes of your columns, click on the tool at the lower right of your screen, the one with an arrow pointing right and an arrow pointing down. This is the “object size” tool and you can enter an exact width and height for your columns and make subsequent columns exactly the same size. You can also make text flow automatically to the next column. Choose View/Toolbars>Connect Text Boxes. This adds a small tool bar to the rest of your toolbars. The button that looks like a chain link is how you “link” text boxes so that your text will automatically flow into the next text box. There are two ways to make your text completely fill the text boxes so you don’t have any dead space at the end of your story or article. First, you can manipulate font sizes. Next you can manipulate the text box sizes with the object size tool mentioned earlier. Get ready, your page layouts are about to improve.
February 2006 Tip
Some of our customers have been experiencing a problem with Microsoft Publisher where it appears to lock up while working with our files. Since our newsletter files contain a lot of color graphics they tend to be rather large files. What is actually happening with Publisher when it appears to lock up is that it is performing its automatic save function. Since our files are large and depending on the speed of your computer and the amount of its’ memory, it could take up to 20-30 seconds for this save function to complete. The answer is to re-set your auto save function in Publisher to take place at larger intervals of time. The default is every 10 minutes. To do this, click on Tools>Options then the Save tab; then increase the “Save Autorecover info” to be performed every 30-40 minutes. You will still be protected from losing no more than the last 30-40 minutes of your work. If you are working on a really slow computer you may want to just turn this feature off and control your own saves at your own times. Hope this helps.
January 2006 Tip
Don’t forget about the cropping tool in Microsoft Publisher. You can use it to crop any photo or graphical image. Let’s say that you’re working on a page with one of our full color backgrounds and, because a particular graphic you want to use does not have a transparent background, you need at lease one column on the page to just have a white background. You could just squeeze the color background graphic to the right or left to uncover a one-column width space but this skews the background. Sometimes this looks fine but maybe this time you don’t want that. Just click on the background, and then the crop tool, and crop part of the background graphic. This will uncover part of the page but will not skew the background graphic. Happy cropping!