Developing websites and mashups for small businesses has offered me the opportunity to venture into new territory with almost every client. Along the way I have learned to create, hack, and fix PHP pages for Forums, Blogs, Chatrooms, and even Ecommerce applications. Customers needing special effects taught me some cool CSS and Javascript tricks too.

But the latests thing I had to learn was to create a custom HTML/CSS template for email. While this sounds easy on the surface you have to consider the users email application and whether it will display images, background images, or even ignore all your CSS code. So you have to be logical in your design. While many designers may drop back to the comfort of nested tables I chose to use CSS. The customers newsletter had featured a right sidebar and left content. In order to use table structure I would have had to put the sidebar contents below the main content. But since the sidebar included the Table of contents and several important bits of text, the CSS structure allowed me to place the text above the articles which if all CSS was turned off, would read more logically.

Jeffery Zeldman has a couple of recent posts about whether email should even be a platform for design, and questions if we should even be trying to design HTML email. Catch it at…Zeldman.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 12:48 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.