Newsletter Design to send in emails, using tables or table less

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+3 Q:

Newsletter Design to send in emails, using tables or table less

How HTML newsletters should be designed? using tables or divs and css styles.

I read somewhere that newsletter should be designed using tables because many of the old client can't process the css style. how much truth is in this?

What else need to be care of when designing newsletter to send using email.

i.e. java script should not be used in newsletter as it is disabled in most of the email clients. what else?

I have read this article. although it was written two years back but I am not sure If writen things are still valid... http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/code-html-email-newsletters

Depending on the version of Outlook the user has, background images will not work (2007) due to security concerns, but they will work in 2003.

When I created an email campaign for a company I worked for, we broke the newsletter into sections of images that linked to various areas of our site using a table to structure it with some css. Worked for most email clients.

mjw06d 2010-10-21 15:11:45

+3 A:

This is a good place to start: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/design-guidelines/

Or in general:
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/category-archive/cat/designing-and-building-emails/

PS: I've no relation with the site but I do think the articles are really useful though some are dated a few years ago.

o.k.w 2010-10-21 15:13:10

Good resource. We use that at work.

James South 2010-10-21 15:15:25

Good set of guidelines.

mjw06d 2010-10-21 15:16:18

Tables are usually the best option for consistent layout in HTML emails - some email clients have problems with divs, so it's really the best option.

CSS usually has to be inline (ie on each item to be styled) or embedded in the page - embedded CSS can't be in the <head> section (since this may be stripped out by web-based clients).

Here's a couple of links from MailChimp about designing HTML emails which I've found useful:

http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/background-images-and-css-in-html-email/ http://www.mailchimp.com/kb/article/how-to-code-html-emails/

What 2010-10-21 15:48:10

As it is News letter, it does not need be SEO. Better to have table instead of DIV. and Table render faster than Div.

Kamahire 2010-10-21 15:53:23

I did some research into this for a client about a year ago based on analytics from sending 200,000 newsletters.

I did lots of mail client testing and discovered (very sadly) that the most reliable coding method was sticking to the W3C HTML 3 standard.

Problem is a frightening number of people are still using Outlook 2000 and some really old versions of outlook express.

toomanyairmiles 2010-10-21 19:58:41

ansaurus

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Newsletter Design to send in emails, using tables or table less

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