Email using graphics

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Permalink Reply by Scott Murphy on March 9, 2009 at 11:17pm

Hi Michael,

Are you talking about a html email/newsletter?

Since you tagged 'dreamweaver', I'm assuming you use dreamweaver. You could mock up the html in dreamweaver (or whatever editor of your choice) and send it as a html email. You can look at this tutorial. If you are sending it out to a large number of users, I recommend you test it in various mail apps like gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail and others.

If you aren't familiar with html, you could always go with mailchimp that makes this stuff super easy.

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Permalink Reply by Michael Daly on March 10, 2009 at 3:30pm

Thanx Scott,
Yes its about html.
Yes I use Dreamweaver (don't tell the code geeks).
I will check out the links in depth when I get time. I took a quick look and it looks promising. I'll probably find something here that is good for what I want and I'll let you know.
I want to thank you now.
Actually I did a test:
1) mock up a html page in Dreamweaver 2) copy code to my Hotmail message and click on HTML. 3) send
Results: The text didn't hold its formatting and the images came up a "?" boxes.
I once copied a source code from someone eles email html to my Hotmail and did the same thing. Everything had carried over perfectly, so I thought my Dreamweaver method might work too but it didn't. I'm missing a basic principle in my thinking.

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Permalink Reply by Scott Murphy on March 10, 2009 at 8:41pm

I haven't tried sending html emails from hotmail but are you sure that hotmail allows you to input html? It might be rich text w/ their wysiwyg editor and they don't allow you actually input raw html. Or the ??? could be related to encoding issues.

Usually you send newsletters from some kind of newsletter program but if you are just planning to send it to a few recipients, try outlook and thunderbird (free). These programs should allow you to input html so you can send it from there.

Scott

Michael Daly said:

Thanx Scott,
Yes its about html. Yes I use Dreamweaver (don't tell the code geeks). I will check out the links in depth when I get time. I took a quick look and it looks promising. I'll probably find something here that is good for what I want and I'll let you know. I want to thank you now.
Actually I did a test:
1) mock up a html page in Dreamweaver 2) copy code to my Hotmail message and click on HTML. 3) send
Results: The text didn't hold its formatting and the images came up a "?" boxes.
I once copied a source code from someone eles email html to my Hotmail and did the same thing. Everything had carried over perfectly, so I thought my Dreamweaver method might work too but it didn't. I'm missing a basic principle in my thinking.

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Permalink Reply by Brian Russo on March 12, 2009 at 1:40am

Depending on your audience, consider that many organizations/people disable HTML email.

At the least it's more likely to end up marked as spam.

And if you do anything fancy, consider that mail clients are even more of a wild west than web browsers when it comes to rendering "HTML" (whatever that is anymore).

- bri

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Permalink Reply by Michael Daly on March 12, 2009 at 1:33pm

Good point Brian,

It didn't occur to me that certain disabled people would not be able to understand a html email.

I didn't get what you said:

mail clients are even more of a wild west than web browsers when it comes to rendering "HTML"

cheers
md

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Permalink Reply by Brian Russo on March 15, 2009 at 6:29pm

Back in the day HTML was relatively simple. We had hyperlinks and simple formatting. Then we added tables.. javascript.. Fast forward to now and we have flash and silverlight.. sophisticated AJAX.. CSS.. etc..

As a web designer I'm sure you know that different browsers or versions of browsers may or may not support certain features or will support it but display it differently.

Mail clients are similar in this way, but on average support fewer features than a modern browser will. So you'd want to design it with that in mind.


Michael Daly said:

Good point Brian,

It didn't occur to me that certain disabled people would not be able to understand a html email.

I didn't get what you said:

mail clients are even more of a wild west than web browsers when it comes to rendering "HTML"

cheers
md

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Permalink Reply by Ben Kinsey on May 30, 2009 at 9:21am

If you think making cross platform/browser web pages is difficult, just wait until you try cross email client html emails.

In general one must keep the html in emails super simple. I've found different email clients render html in different ways, some stripping out certain styles (e.g. outlook), and some (e.g. squirrelmail) stripping out all the html altogether. Remember that an email can embed an html version as well as a text version, and this is a good option if you have the time and technical skills.

As for images, there are two ways to include images in an html email: (1) as remote images, these almost never get displayed by default, the user has to click something to see them. (for good reason, they can be used to determine if a user has viewed the email, which may be a privacy/security issue) (2) embedded within the email itself. Again, different email clients handle these differently, some displaying the images as attachments. If you can do what you need to do with a bit of styling, that would usually be more consistent across email clients.

So far, my personal tool of choice for crafting email in a php web application is swiftmailer, it does everything I need.

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