The downside is it will be much harder to line things up and make it look nice. Maybe url’s then marketing tag line?

I hadn’t even gotten around to messing with my email sig since that is mainly personal but I have been sprucing up my various forum signatures.

What’s next? Blog signatures?

– Matt Smith –
MyHomePoint – Powering the Modern Family
SwoofWare – It’s only work if somebody makes you do it

alexking.org – chances are it’s your personal site

kingdesign.net – looks like a design firm to me …

feedlounge.com – probably a web app / forum / blog of some sort, probably should click on it if I want to know more.

I don’t see how “personal” “king design” or “feedlounge” being placed before the url tells me any more then what the URL already tells me…

matt – that’s kind of the point – you’re saying not to give them anything to read.

Perhaps I just need to put an uber-about page up here or something.

Sorry, I’m not big on hand-holding.

[I even have a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, which I've chosen to obfuscate via TinyURL. Please note that I am not reponsible if you view this while consuming liquids.]

CM – HTML e-mail is evil, and the sites already cross-link.

Another question that may affect things is whether you generally send email in HTML or plain text. HTML would usually mean a variable width font, which would screw up any cool spacing in a lot of instances, while plain text would let you establish more positioning.

Also, a totally off-the-wall idea here: What if you did setup a single site that linked to your others instead? Then you could put a single URL in your signature and have it list everything else — something very simple that only serves to provide links and short descriptions to the rest of your sites (I’m thinking along the lines of automattic.com – big and graphical, yet simple).

I dislike the tall ones. I think a signature should be no more than 2 or 3 lines, tops. Anything past that and I start feeling like I’m reading something from our marketing department… God I hate that confidentiality notice.

Still, on the other side of the coin, I think tagging all your URLs onto one line makes it too wide — a signature should never wrap (and that’d put you at wrapping after about 2 replies in my clients) and should in general never take up more than 1/3 of my screen’s width. It’s meant for reference so it shouldn’t grab my attention until I go seeking more information (or, obvioiusly, get to the end of the email).

So we’re now left with some kind of combination of tall and wide. Personally, I like Matt’s — it’s simple, it’s short, it’s skinny, and it includes all the information you need. Unfortunately, you can’t get the nice even look with just 3 URLs, so perhaps including ‘taskspro.com’ could even things out without being overkill (since it is your flagship product).

On a personal note, I also don’t like including ‘Personal’ and ‘Business’, etc. in there. I think that makes it too large again, and it should really be pretty obvious what’s what anyway. I also don’t like how Matt tried to center “http://photomatt.net” in the first “cell”. Until you realize it’s centered, it just looks out of place and like he made a typo by indenting the first line. The second “column” is also left-justified (since there’s no hard border), which makes it even worse.

Now, to totally mix things up, I just thought about shortening everything:


--
Alex King
alexking.org | kingdesign.net | feedlounge.com


Or something to that effect. Stripping off the “http://” at the beginning of each URL helps keep the length down (not to mention eliminating the part everyone knows about these days anyway) and lets you combine everything onto one line without risking wrapping too quickly.

I’ve never seen an email from Matt, but I’d be interested to see what he did after leaving CNet — is it still in his signature? If not, what’d he do when it went down to an un-even 3 URLs?

Last but not least, the conservative companies. I don’t think you should worry about being too individualistic or personal in your signature based on the company politics. Unless you’re misrepresenting yourself in the first place (which I highly doubt from you) and leading them to believe you’re more than a one-man-band, they shouldn’t be surprised that you’re an individual. It’s not like getting an email from someone at Microsoft or BMW, etc. that’s pushing their own URL. When you hire someone from what’s obviously a large company, you expect something different than when you hire a self-employed contractor or consulter. In the end I don’t think it would cause any kind of problem.

Just my 2 cents — hope it helps.