If you’re frustrated by the design limitations of mobile devices, you may find some satisfaction in the fact that it’s not as bad as creating HTML designs that work in all of the email programs out there. If you really want to ensure your emails look good, you’ll need to test them in a long list of email programs as diverse as gmail, which is surprisingly limited (and increasingly popular), Microsoft Outlook, which is as quirky as Internet Explorer, and then there’s Thunderbird, hotmail, and so many others…
If you want to improve your email designs, you may benefit from this great article by Bob Ricca
6 Easy Ways to Improve Your HTML Emails
Like many other web designers, I thrive on coding beautiful yet flexible web pages that display virtually identical in every web browser. Unfortunately, designing email newsletters sends you back ten years. Deprecated tags, tables, inline styling, oh my! In this article, I’ll list six methods that will immediately improve your email layouts. (read full article)
Also check out this article by Matthew Kirk for practical tips about how to design for the ‘dark ages’ to make your HTML pages display well in most email programs.
20 Email Design Best Practices and Resources
Even for experience designers, building email newsletters isn’t easy. You receive a lovely looking design, and you crack on with the development. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work as it should in every email clients. Styles don’t display, images aren’t visible, etc. (Read his twenty best practices on email design).
I’m working on developing similar kinds of best practices documents for mobile web design, but those of us interested in the mobile web are often also challenged with designing for email newsletters, which can be far more challenging then designing for all the web browsers on computers these days (and we all know that’s hard enough).
Please email me links to your best practices or send me your tips directly for inclusion in my next post. Thanks! janine@jcwarner.com
