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.
I use Fireworks and you need to be careful!
Although the initial process is good and you can quickly code up templates and get a good standard HTML base. Fireworks will add tables and give them colspans which will not render correctly across all browsers.
But having said that I do still use it to quickly set table sizes and get a good HTML base, I then go in and add remove styles as needed.
I say go for it but don’t rely on Fireworks solving all your issues and be sure to test, test and then test some more!
Hi Matt,
I agree with you about it being an option purely for the base and that you should test, test, test. Great points but the gist of this articles is that it is really because Fireworks DOES make tables and colspans that I think it is a viable tool for custom HTML email designs. I would never use Fireworks, or tables and colspans for that matter, in website design but for HTML emails tables render as expected. Trying to write web standards compliant code for HTML emails and have them render correctly in all the different email clients is a nightmare.
Although this article is over 18 months old now I still recommend writing code like we did 15 years ago in order to get consistent results in email clients. Just don’t do it for the web