Hi Kathy,
See how the card plays on your site here. It is a hidden “no index, no follow” page so no one would find it unless they had the URL.
I’ve worked on all the transitions, fades, tweens so I’m happy with how this flows. I thought it would be fun to not do the standard “Here is your card, now let me open it.” but show the card sticking from envelope and then have a gust of wind blow it away and then fade to the full animated card.
Hosting & Delivery
I’d suggest self-hosting this on a hidden, “no follow” page on your website (this way search engines won’t pick it up) and I can delete it after the holidays or you can keep it up if that’s your preference.
As I mentioned, Mailchimp only supports animated gifs, no video, so we could include an image with play button to launch animation on your site. We can also include a link within the text greeting on Chimp so there are two ways to get to the card. I actually like this because it drives users to your site.
Responsiveness
This is 550 x 400 pixels so it will display nicely on phone, tablets, desktop. I didn’t want to make it larger than this because then you can run into playback issues. Also want to keep file relatively small since it is self-hosted.
Two Choices
I’ll give you a suite of sorts to choose from. I’ll create another Mailchimp for you with an embedded animated gif (snow scene) in case you want to use as a follow-up New Year’s card? Only issue with animated gifs is some email clients don’t support them and compatibility issues might cause only the first frame of the gif to display. If you do use it, I’d do so in the way I’ve done— a scene that doesn’t include any important information that the user will miss if the animation doesn’t play. I could not turn my animation into an animated gif because I have additional action scripting (about 20 lines of code I wrote) so it doesn’t play the snow falling because gifs basically pick up “slide-show-fashion” the image frames.
A few things for you to decide to finalize the animated card:
- This is set to autoplay and loop. Let me know if you prefer user to hit the play button to launch animation.
- If not autoplay, do you want the animation to end on tree scene or to fade to white?
- I will swap out the text greeting with the copy you provide me. Best to keep it short and sweet as I’ve done here. Thanks.