You've seen them -- those fancy quotes or little drawings at the end of email messages. They're known as Signatures or Sigs. Here's the low-down on how you can create a Sig of your own along with some helpful resources.

By Rhonda McGuinness

A Signature file, also known as a sig line or sig file, can be found at the bottom of email messages. They are clever little quotes, messages, or even artwork used to convey a special message. Email, being the most widely-used Internet application, make the use of a signature file a very powerful marketing tool. Think of it as your business's letterhead.

A signature file should contain the following information:
Your name
Your organization
Contact information (phone and fax numbers)
Your URL and email address
A brief description of your products and/or services and the
appropriate URLs.

This gives the recipients of your mail an easy way to contact you and your Web site. Just type in your URL as http://www.yourbusiness.com, and most newer email programs will recognize it as a link.

Easily linked email addresses can be made using the HTML mailto tag. Type mailto:youremail@yourbusiness.com, and the latest email programs will link it to your email address.

You build your Sig file in NotePad or any text editor by typing the file just as you want it to appear.You can also cut and paste any ASCII art you have collected and save the file as a .txt file. Depending on which email program you are using, you can then set your program to automatically input your new Sig file into your outgoing email.

Frequently ASCII Art is used to draw attention to the sig line. ASCII Art is a simple drawing made from keyboard characters. You can create your own or you can find some good examples in numerous places on the Web. A few examples are:

ASCII ARTS

Flump's ASCII Collection and

Christopher Johnson's ASCII Art Collection

If you are really adventurous and want to make your own computer generated ASCII Art, try Figlet, a program for generating original ASCII artwork.

Famous Quotes can give an extra flare. To use them just pick a quote you deem appropriate from any of these resources:

Barlett's Familiar Quotes

Good Quotations By Famous People and

The Quotations Page

There are a few programs available to help in the design and maintenance of your sig files.

Byelines

Esig and Esig97

I hope this little tutorial has been helpful. Signature files are important tools in Internet marketing, they give you the opportunity to advertise your web site, and it doesn't even cost anything.

Copyright © 1997 Rhonda McGuinness All Rights Reserved