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Designing for email certainly can be…
November 15th, 2007 by Bronto Software
Designing for email certainly can be… tricky. Desktop and online email clients render email differently, requiring much more planning and testing while creating a message, than designing and building for the web. At the end of the day, the main goal should be that any contact, no matter how they access your message, will see professional, sharp looking content.
There are many nuances to creating HTML messages, but some here are 4 easy points to remember:
- Table-based positioning: Email client CSS support is several years behind, so using tables is really the only option to ensure consistent rendering. This might go against every urge you have if you’ve done any proper web-design in the last few years, but
tables are a must for emails. CSS-positioning just won’t work as most email clients don’t support it. To ensure a sharp-looking message for all your contacts, use some creativity with nested tables and make some minor sacrifices. - Inline Style: Web designers are used to declaring the style within the <head> tag, or linking to an external style sheet. Neither of these options will work for email. Most of the online email clients strip out these declarations, which means that you will need to turn these declarations into inline style. For example:
Background-images: Most email clients support background images, but Outlook 2007 doesn’t. (See a work around for this.
This means that if you do choose to use background images, be sure to also set a background color for the same area that fits in with the design to ensure clients receive your content and that it still looks sharp.Testing: We’ve said it a thousand times and we’ll say it a thousand more. Testing is crucial to email marketing, especially when it comes to email rendering. You should test your email in every email client that you can get your hands on. Sign up for the freebies (Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL, Gmail, etc.) and install the desktop clients (Outlook 2003 and 2007, Thunderbird, Lotus Notes, etc.) and test each message you send to ensure they render correctly. The simple fact is that you might not be able to make
the message render exactly the same in each email client (especially Outlook 2007), but making sure that the layout looks clean and professional for all of your contacts is crucial to your brand image and reputation.
Based on other trends in email marketing (images being blocked by default for example) take your time to correctly build your message using a good balance of text and images.
Don’t be scared if this may seem like a daunting task. Sure, it might be easier to send out an all-images email then run and hide in a cave, but to make your email marketing program successful you have to work for it!
Posted in Best Practices |
Tagged With: rendering
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