Html and CSS for emails, how to, where to?

Question

Hi,

I have to design quite a lot of html email.

The way I do it at the present is I design and html file and the css until it´s looking good in the browser.

Then I send it, and start fixing it for the different clients, there it all goes really wrong (believe me outlook plays tricks on your mind, much like his cousin IE does).

The question is: is there actually a more reasonable way to do this? A way that doesnt imply so much more time fixing and solving than making?

Maybe the problem is that I haven´t read the correct documentation, any advice? is there and "email html" good documentation? books? what ever, I´m desperate!

Thanks in advance!

PS: I hope this isn´t taken as an open question. I´m asking for any methods that will improve the efficiency coding html email.

Answer 1

HTML and CSS in emails are probably the hardest challenge any designer could tackle. Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks created a drawing table after he learned of its use as a relatively sure-fire way to style emails without images: http://css-tricks.com/drawing-table/

I would guess your best bet is to go heavy with the tables.

Answer 2

I do quite a bit of HTML emails for my job. Some of the rules we follow:

1. Use CSS sparingly. It works ok for colors but not really for anything else across multiple clients
2. CSS you do use must all be inline. (no <style> tags, just style= attributes).
3. Tables for layout, positioning won't work reliably.
4. Basically follow the HTML 3 standard