I teach HTML email design and development to a variety of web and marketing professionals and the toughest thing for people to grasp when learning to create effective HTML emails is the fact that there really are no rules. There are no set of standards for HTML email, no W3C specifications, nada, nothing, zilch.
So I have my own rule: do what works!
I am a developer who admittedly goes overboard about writing clean, efficient, and effective code but I am starting to chill where emails are concerned. I am seriously considering using Adobe Fireworks as my design and development tool…I know, ouch!
I think using Fireworks might actually be good for my mental health though. I can separate the email development from the rest of my workflows and not have to hard code table tags and inline CSS styles (something that makes me wretch just a little bit as I do it.)
I could do my layout in Fireworks, slice up the layout (ensuring that I slice around the text), then export as HTML and images. From here I can open it up in Dreamweaver, delete the slices of text and replace with real text. Quick and easy!
I haven’t made the switch just yet, I still hard code everything and I still use real text with CSS styling that works instead of one big image (that doesn’t display by default)…but watch this space as I hear the dark side calling.