e-newsletter issues

[dyers78]

i am a bundle of questions. I do a monthly enews letter here at work. it's basically a web page with little snip-its of info that link back to my site, a couple small images and some pretty colors.

I use a company called groundspring to send and monitor my mailing. I am getting a little unimpressed with their software. Does anyone use a company/software they really like. I want to be able mailmerge names for personalization, switch to a css layout (groundspring doesn't seem to support this very well?) and maybe add a splash of JS every once and a while.

Also, I notice the layout changes drastically from computer to computer and browser to browser. It's a standard table design nothing fancy but sometimes the bg color won't show which sucks because the font is white, when the bg color decides to not display you can't see any text?

Any suggestions?

[reuber1]

If it's being sent by e-mail, it might be interpreted differently depending on the receipient's e-mail client (i.e. GMAIL, which by default displays no images)

[JPnyc]

CSS support is very spotty in email clients. Go with as much old fashioned html commands as you can.

[dyers78]

good to know. Images displpay ok, it's mainly the bg color on the tables and for example I styled my <li> to bullet, space appropriatly yada yada and the bulleted text was all over the page depending on which browser and client you have?

How the does Adobe do their newsletter. i know they are a big hitter, but that has be done with CSS? Mind boggling I tell you

[chris_bcn]

aye - it's possible to go a CSS route with HTML email newsletters, but tables and spacer gifs are teh way to go. Even then different clients render it differently. Especially if any of the recipients use Lotus Notes!

[resdog]

Couple of answers for you. When dealing with email, it is sometimes better to use CSS for some things. For example, when you design html for an email, you can pretty much disregard the [body] tag attributes (color, image, etc.), as most web email clients (gmail, hotmail, yahoo) strip out the body tag attributes anyway.

And I wouldn't recommend using JS, as most web email clients also strip out any scripting. This is to protect their pages from acting funny or phishers to scam more people.

As to CSS, you need to make sure you use inline CSS code (i.e. [td style="color:#bddfed;"], because most web email clients remove everything from the [head] tag. You can't link to external style sheets for the same reason. When I started doing email newsletters, I found that browser compatibility stunk. Hotmail and Gmail are not very strict with their rules of what they allow. After doing research, I discovered that the best way to create email newsletters was to use a table (never set to 100% width, but 99%) and inline CSS styles. This means that you will have repetetive styles, but that's kind of how it needs to be. If you have global colors, fonts, etc., or you want to have a different background color, then surround your table with a [div] tag and use that as your [body] tag, assigning inline styles to it. That way you can still have the margins, background color etc control globally, without using the [body] tag.

You can't really help that some email clients turn off images by default. if your email list is opt-in, most likely they will change that setting anyway. I hope this helps you!

[dyers78]

that does help. It actually explains alot of my problems I thought were in my coding. All my styles are in the head which is probably why I am having positioning issues and I have tried to add a body bg color with no luck. Thought I was crazy... good stuff