Part of my job involves turning psd designs into html to be emailed out for email campaigns. In the past I've always gone through and converted everything to a suitable html element where possible but I'm now questioning whether there's any point to it?
Is okay just to use one giant image? I only ask because it seems using html elements is only really important if a) I want the information in the email to get to the client if images are blocked and b) for SEO.. yet search engines won't be indexing my code since it's all going through email.
If I'm pretty confident that the clients I'll be mailing won't have the images blocked, is it okay just to treat the entire email body as an <img />?
Thanks
I guess it would be okay, but I wouldn't recommend it. Here are a few reasons why:
The readers won't be able to select and copy any of the content in the email, which in my opinion is really annoying.
You will not be able to have links in your email, the only thing you can link is the entire image.
If they do have images disabled, which i believe is fairly common, the wouldn't see a thing without downloading the image.
Increased email size due to the large image, which for mobile devices is a pain.
An image will not adapt to the window/display size. Text/HTML-based mails can at least break row if the content doesn't fit, to make it more readable.
And the list goes on. The other answers point out a number of additional reasons as well.
I don’t know that there is any definitive answer to this question, but here is my take on it:
I think it’s a good idea to convert certain elements to text so that they can be copied or manipulated. If you have a phone number, you may want that to be readable so that anyone with an automated dialer can click and complete the call. Certain email programs might automatically convert an address to a link to the map. Those features won’t work if any of these elements are flattened into the jpg.
For those mobile email clients that will not render the image on the screen (either because it’s just showing the preview or hasn’t yet downloaded the content) it’s useful to see some of the alternate text (and body content) before viewing the full image.
I know you said that you are sure your clients won’t have images blocked, but you can’t really rely on that. A well-meaning administrator who makes a change to the firewall could accidentally block all incoming images to the entire domain and your email will be worthless.
Lastly, an HTML email with one line of code to load an image has a high possibility of being flagged as spam.
I hope this helps!
What about bandwidth concerns, for users viewing your email on a mobile device? If it's a large image, do you want to blow out their data caps?
Or users using assistive technology, for visually-impaired people. Such as a screenreader(text to speech).The real text is helpful for scenarios like that.
Related
I just read this article that talks about how email clients clip emails that are over a certain size and sometimes even marks them as spam.
Since images are included in most emails using a <img src="https://www.files/my-image.png">, would these images be included in the size calculation? They're loaded asynchronously so I'm confused if they would be or not.
It all depends on the mail service provider. The type of message that you are sending and the recipient - and of course you don't always know the answer! You can embed, you can encode and you can include links to images. It's impossible to expect everyone to get the emails you want to send!
For instance HTML emails. Who would know if the email you send will survive the process? There is so much that could go wrong.
When using images in an email I try to go for one picture and a logo as a max, with the text set up to appear early on and to get to the point. If I have a long message, I will want to tease it on the email, get the click and have my recipient come to a landing page where I have much more space and much tighter control.
This I find increases my open rates etc, most importantly, it tends to be the way that gets the most people to take action. I do like to use styled HTML. This means that the emails look good yet the focus is on the text so if the style does not survive the transmission, the message still gets through.
You have some choices!
I have been tasked with changing some email templates (password resets, etc.). The new templates I have been given are simple, but include a few small images for aesthetic reasons. What are the best practices for including these in emails?
As I understand it, many email providers block images by default due to privacy and tracking concerns (tagging users using unique image URLs for each recipient and waiting for their browser to load the resource). Would using a data URI for images be an effective solution to this issue, or are these blocked too? (And if so, I would love to know why!)
Aside from the fact that really old browsers (IE7-) do not support this format, are there any other reasons not to use it? As far as I understand it, when it comes to email you need to be as simple and transparent as possible, and I worry that doing something a little bit unusual like this could set off alarm bells in the spam filters. Is this concern justified?
Foreground Images (JPG, PNG, GIF) are universally understood in all major email clients. Markup is the same as on a web page (<img src="">). Things like background images, SVG, or data URIs work in some clients but not all, it's best not to rely on these as a way to display essential images. SVG support in email clients.
Some email clients block images by default, but can be downloaded is user clicks a button. Here is a good rundown on image blocking in email clients.
It is theoretically possible to have a converter, that scans the color areas of a bitmap image and creates the same looking image, but using the CSS/HTML. CSS could be controlling colours of pixel-small html blocks. The further optimisation could be done by introducing the larger html blocks with similar color maps.
The resulting markup would be very large, but is it theoretically possible to achieve?
The main goal is to be able to e-mail clients a good looking promotional and informational e-mails, bypassing the problem of 99% of the recipients won't click to enable images in an e-mail. With such HTML-encoded images, a sender is sure that the e-mail looks as expected on the client side.
CSS does not reliably render in email. Bypassing any problems with your theoretical scanner, this is why images are the go-to standard in designed emails.
To see what I mean, look at Campaign Monitor's Guide to CSS support in email.
This would generate so much markup and put such a strain on the rendering engine of the recipient's email client that I don't think it would be viable in practice.
Also I wouldn't trust most email clients to render CSS accurately / reliably.
It is probably theoretically viable (in terms of actually generating the HTMl/CSS), although screen size may be an issue with this (for example divs could get pushed onto the next line whereas in the image they were inline).
I have a website http://www.bccfalna.com/ and the contents on this site are in HINDI Language. I want to make all these pages read only for peoples so that they can not copy the content.
Since I have written some books in HINDI Language on Computer Technology and I know that there are very few Information in HINDI language on the Internet about the Computer and I.T. Technology so I want to sell my EBooks in PDF format.
To show the usefulness of the contents of my books, I have placed all the contents in TEXT format in my website, so that people can see, read and can make decision to buy the book if the book is useful for them.
Since I have placed my whole books in Content form on my site so that various search engines also can give more and more traffic to my site but I am afraid that since I have placed all my content on my site in text form, any one can copy and will not be interested to buy them as PDF Format EBOOK.
I want that people can Read the content of my site but can not be able to copy the contents in any word processor.
Is it possible?
I don't want to make image like content, because Google, Yahoo like modern search engines don't gives too much importance to image sites.
I don't want to use Flash like sites too. The reason is same. Modern Search Engines don't gives too much attention to these kinds of sites.
I want my contents in TEXT format but I want to make them READ ONLY. Is it possible? If Yes: I would like to know HOW? and if No, I would like to get the alternative type solution.
Is there someone Genius to solve this problem? Thanks.
Generally speaking, any web content that is readable by a search engine will also be readable and copyable by people visiting your page.
I suppose you could examine the user_agent in the HTTP request to determine whether it originated from a popular search engine or not; if it did, return the plain-text of your content; if it did not, return a raster image of your content (text in an image can't be selected for copying and pasting, but it could be OCR'd or otherwise printed by the user). Some websites will use a script to disable right-clicking to save an image (but such scripts can easily be circumvented). Some sites will place a transparent image over the image containing the content (but this, too, can be circumvented). Note that the user_agent can be falsified if the web surfer knows you're treating search engines specially.
I suggest the best approach, though, is to keep things simple. Only publish the first chapter of your book and a table of contents online, or else only publish the first page of each chapter, or something similar. Search engines do not need the complete text of your book, only representative samples. Nobody will go to the trouble of copy/pasting your text if they can only get to a portion of the complete book.
You can't make it indexable to search engines and incapable of being copy & pasted... Google has to be able to copy words from your text to use in it's index. Maybe you could put snippets of the parts you want indexed in text format and put the majority in image/flash. It's not uncommon to see chapter previews on websites selling books.
Try Google Books:
I don't know if it works with the HINDI Language (It works. Some examples: http://www.scribd.com/doc/15257971/Google-Hindi-Books)
This solution allows Google to index and everyone to read the whole content. Anyhow copying remains awkward.
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/tour/
"Read-only" means they cant modify your webpages, "readable but not copyable" is impossible by definition, and makes about as much sense as "I want to give someone some water, but I dont want it to be wet". So, to answer your question, no this is not possible at all. (I regularly have to deal with people who think that this (and others) law of physics/mathematics doesn't apply to them, so sorry if I sound a bit rude.)
On a practical level, if you only give them some of the information, then they will only be able to copy that part of the information. (If they buy the book, they will be able to copy the rest from there.)
As others here have said, what you are asking is not possible.
If you host content for people to view in a browser, and for Google to index, there is absolutely no way to stop anyone from copying it. It is possible to make copying the content difficult (or at least inconvenient), but there's no way to stop someone from copying it if that's what they really want to do.
The only alternative, as others have already said, is to only post the first chapter of the book, and allow your readers to make a judgement based on that chapter. If they like the chapter they'll buy the whole book. This is a pretty common practice.
I understand that posting only part of the content is not what you want, but if you want to make it impossible to copy the whole book then this is your only real option.
The other alternative is to not worry about it. Cory Doctorow (and others I'm sure) publishes all his books under a Creative Commons license. They are free to download from his website but he still manages to make money from selling actual books. If people like your work enough, they'll pay to have it in a nice format.
There is, a way to instruct the browser to disable copying text. This does not, however, prevent copying, just makes is difficult. Not all browsers recognize this, especially older browsers. However, there are ways around this, the user can download the entire page and search for the text embedded in the HTML.
Another way, is to make it a graphic, rather than ASCII text. That way would mean that if anyone really wanted to copy your content, they would have to go through the process of using OCR (optical character recognition), then proof read plus correct the result.
Another way is to make it into a Flash animation, that can also be bypassed by doing a screen capture, then doing an OCR. In short, there is no way to prevent copying of material displayed in a browser ... but you can make it difficult and, hopefully, people won't bother.
FYI, typically people want their website to be read-only, to make it difficult or impossible for hackers to change their website content (i.e. replace content with vandalized content) ... not to prevent people from accessing the content legitiamately uploaded to the website.
Hope this helps.
Scan the text and post as an image, people can still read but not copy the text directly. They can copy the image but that will not matter as it would be the same as just reading from the screen they would have to retype it all if they wanted to steal the work.
I'm trying to figure out where to put some code in an email. You know how you can get newsletters with styling and images, etc? I wanted to send some out but I cant figure out where to put the code. Do you add the images as attachments? Do you put the code in the body?
or should you upload the .html file as well?
Build the page as a normal HTML page. Use TABLES (yes, TABLES) for your layout. You can use inline CSS, but you cannot use a stylesheet. All images must be fully-qualified (http://yoursite.com/images/). Don't make it wider than about 650 pixels. No JavaScript.
View your newsletter HTML in a browser
Do a select-all, and copy
Paste it into a new message and send it to yourself
See what you end up with
Try other mail clients
Various mail clients will mess with your markup and your styles. What works on Gmail will look like poop on Outlook etc. It will be an exercise in frustration. Test, test, test.
Assume all images will NOT BE SHOWN when the user originally views the email.
Here's a good guide to what works and what doesn't:
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
My advice: keep it simple - a logo and some text and a link to the real newsletter. Making email newsletters is a fine art, and frankly, people prefer to read them in a browser where they behave like a web page.
Sending out HTML emails eigh?
There can be a lot of problems you will quickly encounter, mostly revolving around each email client having their own different way of handling things. The aim here is to keep your email as small, simple, and unbroken as possible.
The message:
Each language has it's own requirements, you need to check with the language you are using to see what is easier, to do it inline as part of the mailing script, or to have it inserted through a HTML file, etc. So for more details here, post the language you're using.
Layout:
This is where message simplicity comes in. The best layouts are usually the most simple ones, especially considering not all email clients are 100% HTML standards compliant. You won't know how big your client's viewing window for the email will be nor can you force it to any size or pop it out. Remember that it's goal is to be a message, not a webpage. Usually simple flexible/elastic tables will do the trick just fine if you have anything more advanced than simple paragraphs.
Images:
Link everything statically (statically means http:\\www. ....mypicture.png as opposed to dynamic linking which looks like this \images\mypicture.png) hosted from your server. The reason for this is so that you will have no broken links, your email will be smaller in size (as opposed to attatching). The downside is that some clients may ask about showing pictures. The cold hard truth is that this cannot be avoided no matter which method you use (See for more details).
Links:
Again, link everything statically. Local/dynamic link's won't work and your recipients will be mighty unhappy.
CSS
Either have your CSS classes at the top, or everything in-line (< ... style="..." />). You don't want to attach a CSS file, it's messy and unconventional.
Scripts
Inline or at the top of your file, for the same reason as above.
Additional Documents
If you want to include PDF's or DOCX's, etc, the best and most common methodology is just like images, to host on your server and simply include a static link in your email to them. It keeps file size down and you don't have to worry about what each and every email browser/reader is going to do.