Newsletters are a fast and cheap way for marketing. In our first issue we collected articles about contents and concepts. Now we look at the design, coding and testing.
There are many clients you can use free for receiving eMails. Freemail clients as yahoo, hotmail or solutions as lotus notes, outlook … We decided to send designed newsletters in html and hope the user agreed to receive html. To have a good result in all clients here are the best links:
General tipps for your code
- 20 best practices by nettuts
- 6 ways to improve html mails by nettuts
- CSS compatibility
- Design guidelines
- Design mistakes
- Crossclient work by adobe
- How to code by sitepoint
- 10 Basics HTML for newsletters
- Design and build newletters seen by SMASHINGMAGAZINE
Testing the newsletter
Testing can be solved if you have many addresses at all common freemailers and clients installed. Not very efficient and not in all cases a good practice because it depends on the mailer, too, how the code is presented in the client. If you send a html mail using copy and paste with outlook, outlook will modify the code itself. A service for testing your code is previewmyemail.com, it offers some clients views’ free and nearly all for a fee.
- http://www.previewmyemail.com/