I'm currently making an E-Mail for Christmas Greetings. When I send the Mail or put it in "Drafts" he doesnt show the Mail correct.
How it should look
How it looks in reality
I am using WYSIWYG Web Builder 9
You can find the HTML code in the comments.
You'll just have to tweak and test the HTML until it works the way you want it to in Thunderbird.
I'd highly suggest using an email testing tool, such as Email On Acid or Mandrill to test your HTML in less common and dated clients.
HTML emails are painful to code, but it is getting better slowly :)
First off, I would suggest not using div's in email.
Stick with table's, tr's and td's.
Background images in email aren't well supported on desktop email clients like Outlook. Mobile support is great however!
You will need to use this site: http://backgrounds.cm/ to give you a hack to get support in almost all email clients...
Try to remember html email is like coding websites in 1999. It's old school and a pain!
If you get stuck, let me know.
I'm an email developer by trade, and would be happy to give you a reasonable quote to fix this up.
Related
Im testing an e-mail I made from scratch. I’m using litmus and mail chimp and they are both giving me different outcomes.
Anyone know why this happens and which one do I go with?
Since you have not copied any code, I'm assuming you followed the HTML email development guidelines as you cannot code it like it is a webpage?
What guidelines for HTML email design are there?
These are some of the issues I've came across in MailChimp outlook rendering which you may not see in other email testing tools.
https://mailchimp.com/help/my-campaign-looks-bad-in-outlook/
Without knowing the exact issue I can not assure about this, but to confirm whether issue is in MailChimp and not Litmus, you can test your HTML in other testing tools like EmailOnAcid. EmailOnAcid is another nice tool I've used.
Is there anyway how to create an email template that will not broken in gmail and outlook mail services.
Any idea please, I highly appreciate if you can help me with this.
Creating a robust email HTML is a very tough job. The main problem is that there are no email HTML standards and probably you have to support various email clients. To be honest, outlook is one of the most problematic ones.
We have been in the field of email coding for a long time, and we wrote an article series about this topic. If you want to know the fundamentals, I recommend you to read it.
If you don't have that much time, or you don't want to code, you can try out our email editor as well.
I hope it helps.
I an having a problem with my HTML email.
My email is working correctly in most cases, the problem arises when I send to windows live mail.
1) opening the email in widoew live mail in IE all of the text becomes centered even though I have used the 'style="text-align:left;"' and the 'align="left"' options, I have tried them together and tried them seperate.
2)opening in windows live mail in anything other than IE the images have spacing below them. I have used the 'display:block;' and 'border-collapse:collapse;' and set the margin and padding to zero.
I used firebug in firefox to have a look and see what the problem is, it shows either a span tag or a p tag wrapping the img tags. I have no idea why it is doing this or how to fix it!
If anyone can help i'd be really greatful.
Thanks
no the align="left" doesn't work, If I use the align="justify" or align="right" it seems to work but not align="left". I have realised that I am only getting these problems when I send through outlook, I am using outlook 2007. after some studying with firebug it seems to me that outlook is adding its own classes to the email. it seems to be adding either or around all of my images with classes that seem to belong to outlook. I know outlook is not the best program in the world but on some occasions it is the only way I can send emails. is there any way I can get into the code that outlook is producing and change it, I know that sounds a bit drastic but it would be really good if I could. thanks for all the help guys, really appreciate.
A lot of mail clients support only older versions of html. gmail for example will not respect any css file (more information on email on acid) so you are restricted in what you can do with styling.
You can test how your email will look in various clients using online services such as email on acid or litmus.
I would suggest keeping the design very basic and using an old style table based layout.
Is there anything I need to be aware of when creating a HTML e-mail? Is it as simple as creating a valid HTML page then sending it via PHP? Or do I need to use tables to ensure it display's correctly.
Any advice to get this right first time would be much appreciated.
Creating an HTML email that displays the way you want to in email clients, can be very difficult, if not impossible. Unfortunately, email clients do not use the latest and greatest web browsers when displaying emails, and they can also restrict what should be allowed (and with good reasons).
No matter how much you might love CSS-based layouts, table-based layout is still the way to go for HTML emails. You can still use CSS for other things, of course, but in some cases it will need to be inline. The best looking HTML emails I've seen, are largely made up of tables and big images - simply because unlike on normal web pages it is nigh on impossible to create the equivalent using good web development practices. HTML email is a world of its own.
You should also test the emails in as many email clients as you can - and while it can be cumbersome to install all the different clients, you can also use services such as Litmus, MailChimp and CampaignMonitor (see also this question). Personally I have had good experiences with Litmus.
Good luck, creating HTML emails can be quite messy!
Tables are definitely the best option for HTML emails, since most other methods tend to display differently on different machines.
Things to watch out for:
Images are often blocked by email programmes - try to use background colours where possible
Don't link to an external stylesheet - put the styles in <head>. This will prevent your server being hit when the emails are opened.
There's also a good blog post from Mailchimp about using CSS in HTML emails.
Tables is bad...but the correct way to go in emails...
Also send only the part you would normally put in the body and only use inline css.
Another important thing is that background images most of the time dont work.
This is a very good guide that can help you out.
my advice: test in a lot of browsers,mailclients and email programs
You should check out Email on Acid, they not only show you what your email will look like in each client they also analyze your HTML. They highlight the HTML in you code that is not supported in the clients. This tool has saved me hours trying to figure out why an email doesn't render correctly.
One other thing that is very helpful is they provide Tips & Tricks for each client. Anyway you might want to check it out, very helpful.
A designer coded an html template using CSS best practices. I want to use this template as an email newsletter template, but I've heard people say hotmail, yahoo and gmail offer limited support for CSS.
Am I supposed to re-code these templates using table layouts and font tags?
The short answer is Yes.
You're going to get the best compatibility across webmail accounts & email clients by using the most basic and dumbed down HTML possible.
Don't use any CSS files or <style> tags. Do everything inline.
Handle positioning with nested tables that have explicit widths
I make heavy use of HTML comments in these situations to make sure I don't get confused about where I am in the layout.
All text should be surrounded by <font> tags with the font style information.
Images should have explicit widths & heights.
This helps the email retain its proper layout when images are blocked.
I usually test on a minimum of the following:
Outlook 2003
Outlook 2007
Most of your headaches will come from here.
Thunderbird
Entourage (OSX version of Outlook)
Gmail
Hotmail
Yahoo Mail
You're usually in pretty good shape if you get something that shows up properly on all of those.
We use Exact Target and they have an HTML preview feature but it's not perfect. I've run into a lot of situations where an email looked good in the preview but still came through broken in Outlook 2007.
Mark above said everything that you need to do to develop email templates (it's the 90's all over again), but I wanted to add one last thing:
http://www.email-standards.org/ is a great resource to see how different email clients interpret HTML and CSS.
To build on what Mark said:
If at all possible, avoid using CSS at all (though, it's usually alright for things like text). Use tables for all positioning, empty <td> elements for padding/smaller positioning bits.
And even with all this, it's only going to look perfect in a few email programs/sites. HTML email is, I'm fairly confident in saying, utterly impossible to do in such a way that it shows up perfectly in all mail clients/apps.
You'll have to go back to stone-age HTML to get HTML emails to work out as Mark suggested. All styles inline in the html. No STYLE tags or external stylesheets.
MailChimp and CampaignMonitor both offer excellent free HTML email templates. They also both offer email testing services that send your html emails to several different email clients and then send you screenshots of the results.
use div tag with fixed height/weigth and put all your HTML in there. It would look the same in most clients. Iv'e tried it before and it works fine.