Email Workshop - Powell/Masterson (#11NTCEmail)

Email Design Workshop – Don ’t Let Bad Code Ruin Your Day or Your Results #11NTCemail Sean Powell Shana Masterson

WARNING Coding for email is different than coding for the web There are no standards for displaying email HTML !

Goodbye... Hello…
web design best practices
divs
flash, js
external CSS
coding for all email clients
tables
inline CSS
code like it ’s 1999!

http://litmus.com/resources/email-client-stats

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/stats/email-clients/#most_popular

What ’s the big deal? Ensure consistent branding across all clients and messages

http://www.emailonacid.com/blog/details/C6/strategies-for-email-testing Email client rendering engines

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css

Better practices
When possible, allow plenty of time for review and coding
Don ’t trust the WYSIWYG or HTML editors
Use a good text editor
Smultron - http://www.peterborgapps.com/smultron/ (Mac)
Komodo Edit - http://www.activestate.com/komodo-edit/
Code Lobster - http://www.codelobster.com/
Use a tool like premailer to make your styles inline –
http://premailer.dialect.ca/
Include a “View on web” option and/or use alt text in your header “Please turn on images”

Testing
Option 1
Set up many test email accounts and test in various browsers. *Hint – Choose a user name and password that will work consistently across clients.
Install several desktop email programs for testing.
Test on Mac and PC. Option 2
Use a paid service *Litmus – litmus.com
*Email on Acid – emailonacid.com

http://www.wireless.att.com/styleguide/guide/email_templates.jsp Email style guide

HTML cheat sheet excerpt

The Email Standards Project The Email Standards Project is about working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email. The project was formed out of frustration with the inconsistent rendering of HTML emails in major email clients. Our mission is to drive the use and support of web standards in email, working with email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently. This is a community effort to improve the email experience for designers and readers, and we ’d love your help. www.email-standards.org/

lets take a look at some code

but before we do

A few notes about…
What ’s meant by “inline”
Moving styles from an external style sheet/HEAD to within the containing tag.
Looks like: style=“width: 100px; height:100px;…”

… some more basics
Setting heights and widths of images, tables, etc.
Limited use of margin/padding
Limited support for divs
Best to use tables to format your message - nesting helps too
No shortcuts (use border-left-style instead ofborder: 1px solid #000)
Define your alt and/or title attributes
Absolute paths for images
Use the character entity equivalent for special characters like em-dashes, right/left double quotes, and ampersands
✗

Character Entities List of character entities that you can code into your message to get that em-dash(—), ampersand(&), or right double quote( ”) to render correctly. For example: Em-dash = — Ampersand = & A more complete list: http://www.intuitive.com/coolweb/entities.html

Just say no to
background images (although there is a hack now…)
using png’s
using floats for alignment
using divs (somewhat)
CSS3
negative margins
overflow, opacity, position, etc
embedded video (there are some interesting things on the horizon)
fun.
✗

rolling up sleeves

What HTML DOCTYPE should I use? The xHTML 1.0 Transitional doctype is widely used when sending HTML email to help uniformity. Take this with a grain of salt, however, as many email clients will either change it to their preference or remove it altogether. <Markup> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN ” "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1- transitional.dtd"> http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/3317/correct-doctype-to-use-in-html-email/ http://www.emailonacid.com/blog/details/C18/doctype_-_the_black_sheep_of_html_email_design

Using tables Tables are the most common way to format your email consistently. Use a wrapper table to center and set a background for your emails. Set your table widths inside cells and in most cases reset cellpadding, cellspacing, and border to zero. Note: Use nested tables as a way to space effectively in your message.

P tags Fixes an issue with the (new) Yahoo Email client where standard paragraph spacing is not applied (most likely due to a reset of some sort). Note: Many insert a double break (<br />) to create the same “paragraph” type effect. <Markup> <style type="text/css"> . . p { margin: 1em 0 1em 0 ;} . . </style>

Before After

Hotmail header fix Hotmail replaces your header color styles with a green color on H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 tags. In the following example, the color is reset to black. Replace black with your choice of color. The ! Important declaration is really what is overriding Hotmail's styling. NOTE: Hotmail also sets the H1 and H2 tags to the same size.

<Markup> <style type="text/css"> . . . h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { color: black !important; line-height: 100% !important; } h2 a, h2 a:visited, h3 a, h3 a:visited { color: grey !important; /* Preferably not the same color as the normal header color. */ } . . . </style>

Before After

Yahoo link color fix (1 of 2) This fix overwrites Yahoo mail's specific blue coloring on links. It, however, does not set color across email clients that ignore CSS in the HEAD tag. You will still have to bring this inline for gmail/others. http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/3226/two-solutions-to-yahoo-mail-turning-all-your-links-blue/

<Markup> a { color: red; text-decoration: underline;} /** Yahoo Classic and other clients that support styling within the HEAD tags **/ .yshortcuts { color: red !important; text-decoration: underline !important;} /* Body text color for the New Yahoo */ .yshortcuts a span { color: red !important; text-decoration: underline !important; } /* Link text color for the New Yahoo */ Note: This example sets the link color red.

Yahoo link color fix (2 of 2) Simply override the styling color and decoration inline. Do not use in combination with fix number 1 unless you want to style the "yshortcuts" class separately, which this code allows you to do. (INLINE) <Markup> <a href="http://www.responsys.com/blogs/nsm/2010/07/feeling-blue-over-yahoo-email.html" style="color:red; text-decoration:underline;"><span style="color:red;">Here is another fix for Yahoo from Responsys/Smith Harmon </span></a>

Before After

Hotmail/Gmail image issue Hotmail and Gmail inserts unwanted spacing underneath your images. Use this fix to properly space images that line up right on top of each other. <Markup> <img src= “yourimage.jpg” style=“display: block;” alt=“your alt text” width=“x” height=“x” /> img {display: block;} //Place in the <head> area OR

@Media Using @Media queries can help target mobile devices, like handhelds and tablets. While definitely not widely supported, it is has become supported enough where you can target users of iphones, android based phones, ipads, etc when they are using the built in software apps to access email.

<Markup> Note: Try experimenting with portrait and landscape modes. <style type="text/css"> . . @media only screen and (max-device-width: 480px{ Your iphone/handheld styles here . . @media only screen and (device-width: 768px{ Your ipad styles here } . . </style> http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/3163/optimizing-your-emails-for-mobile-devices-with-media/ http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/ipad-specific-css/

in the year 2000

Embedding video
@Font-face
CSS3 (or 2 or 1)
Dynamic content
Google (gmail) – enhanced content
From other companies like Movable Ink

Resources
http://htmlemailboilerplate.com/
www.campaignmonitor.com
www.mailchimp.com
www.emailonacid.com
www.mxtoolbox.com/
www.senderscore.org
aws.amazon.com/ses/
www.scribd.com/doc/28520824/Email-Jitsu
ddf

</presentation>

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http://www.lafermeduweb.net	2925
http://css4design.com	734
http://feeds.feedburner.com	168
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http://openfire3.com	81
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http://www.slideshare.net	28
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url_unknown	20
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http://paper.li	9
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http://static.slidesharecdn.com	4
http://openfire3.tumblr.com	3
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http://perevod.yandex.net	2
http://mmdev.posterous.com	2
http://twitter.com	2
http://htmlemailboilerplate.com} {1073875530\|\|\|pingback	1
http://hn.embed.ly	1
https://bb.csmd.edu	1
http://66.196.80.202	1
http://207.46.192.232	1

Email Workshop - Powell/Masterson (#11NTCEmail)

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Email Workshop - Powell/Masterson (#11NTCEmail) Presentation Transcript