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Building Better HTML Emails
Blog
created on Fri, 2006-07-21 10:37 Mark Wyner, Mark Wyner Design, gave a great and thorough talk on all the aspects to consider in building a better HTML email for you and your company.
- Your desktop is not a launch pad.
- Comic Sans is the devil.
- How do you deploy? Use an email-administration application. Create your own or use one of the many on the market. Mark uses Campaign Monitor and MailBuild.
- Techniques and best practices: The web-standards battle - standards-focused web designers use antiquated markup for design integrity
- Some benefits of web standards:
1. Increased use of handheld/mobile devices, disparate support for presentation layer
2. Accessibility
3. Spam filters assess content-to-code ratios - Embed your style sheets
- An email is a single document
- Account for all scenarios: build for progressive enhancement and create simple experience for lowest common denominator
- Image usage: display contextual images inline (products, people, etc) and display template images as CSS backgrounds
- Email clients offer image blocking
- Preserve format upon forwarding: forwarding-methods vary - as attachment, source code revealed, converted to plain text, converted to proprietary HTML
