mikasissonen's comments

I took a direct marketing copywriting course six or seven years ago that suggested the same, and I've been pinching examples from my junk mail ever since.

In fact, it looks like the course is still running - and even taught by the same instructor I had (John Friesen). If you're in the Vancouver area, I'd recommend it: http://www.sfu.ca/wp/dmc.htm

The mail he valued most was the stuff he'd get repeatedly, year after year, month after month - since presumably it performed the best. If he only saw one example of something, he figured it was a test that didn't pull well.

In my last year of school (1999), I created the web site for our journalism program's annual publication by mimicking the layout of Salon.com, which I liked because it had clean lines and its design was reasonably easy to recreate in Notepad.

From what I recall (and I hope a View Source of the HTML corroborates this), I didn't simply rip off the Salon.com HTML verbatim - instead, I first pasted in all the text I needed on each page, and then added the paragraphs, fonts, tables, and images by hand, because I didn't want to bring along any unnecessary scraps of code. I didn't know CSS at that time, so the HTML was really simplistic, to say the least.

Salon.com, circa 1999: http://web.archive.org/web/19990423201101/http://www.salon.c...

Langara Journalism Review, 1999: http://web.archive.org/web/19990528124312/http://www.langara...

I've been a Hacker News reader for a couple of years under a different username - but for this submission, I've created an account under my real name for full disclosure that I'm linking to something I wrote myself for my work blog at SAP. It seems like a reasonable topic for the site, since it involves a new product that's currently in limited beta, but if this crosses the bounds of appropriateness, I'm happy to cease and desist from submitting similar topics in the future.