Rock Solid HTML Emails

http://24ways.org/2009/rock-solid-html-emails

by bensummers • 17 years ago

63 27 17 years ago

mcormier2• 17 years ago

I'm having major issues trying to view the page in Chrome(Windows). The page renders fine but the scrollbar is "Choppy". Something he's doing in the page is not agreeing with Chrome. Not sure if I want to take advice from someone that creates a page with such a performance issue.

clistctrl• 17 years ago

I had the same issue using Chrome.

adamhowell3• 17 years ago

He's just a guest author.

Drew McClellan is the guy behind 24 Ways (http://allinthehead.com/) and if I remember correctly this design is a couple years old now.

Sidenote, seems Chrome has now entered the "pompous Opera phase", wherein Opera users used to always ignore the fact that they're in the vast minority of web browsers and point out every browser problem they have like it's the designer's fault instead of Opera's for their random rendering bugs.

mcormier2• 17 years ago

Err, Uh. Chrome is 7% of the market, Safari is 3%, and Opera is 2%.

http://www.axiis.org/examples/BrowserMarketShare.html

I know Chrome is only little over a year old, but was surprised as I've never seen it or Safari (WebKit browsers) ever have trouble with a page before.

drewmclellan• 17 years ago

This is a bug with Chrome on Windows, which is apparently fixed in the latest build.

The bug was exposed by our heavy use of RGBA colour, although it didn't affect earlier builds of Chrome or any other Webkit based browser.

scorxn• 17 years ago

Nice overview. See http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/ for more depth based on a much, much larger sample size.

aw3c2• 17 years ago

That site abuses CSS&HTML so badly that it takes all cpu to render.

nudded• 17 years ago

and who's to blame, the designer or your browser?

cschep• 17 years ago

Yes. I just had to open Task Manager to figure what the hell was going on. This box isn't amazing, but a dual core proc being pegged using Chrome to render a web page feels a bit absurd.

ComputerGuru• 17 years ago

Perfectly fine on OS X 10.6.2/Webkit 4 on this measly 13" MacBook.

bugs• 17 years ago

Firefox on linux on a slow laptop/internet connection but the site loaded rather quickly compared to sites like new york times and reuters among others

alizaki• 17 years ago

small tip: DONT add video to email. Spam filters will kill it. Asap.

aeroevan• 17 years ago

Just remember to include a text/plain message too for those of us who keep text/html in their browsers as God intended...

diN0bot• 17 years ago

do you mean include a plain text and html message...and only one will shop up depending on the email viewer? where can i find out more about this and other best practices wrt sending email newletters and progress reports to users?

seiji• 17 years ago

Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME#Alternative

ams6110• 17 years ago

Forget it. Email should be terse, and plain text, especially if it's unsolicited. Anything long or full of images and multiple fonts goes straight to the "Junk" folder.

teej• 17 years ago

Seeing advice to the tune of "don't do it because it's bad!" causes my Hacker sense to sound off alarms. I have to tell myself "You are not the average user!" three times a day, and I'm just making stupid Facebook games.

HTML email is absolutely something you should test. Take 10% of your email list and hit them with an HTML-ized version of your marketing email. How did they respond? Did they buy more or less? Did they unsubscribe?

Asking "Do people want an HTML email?" is the wrong question. Asking "Do people spend more from an HTML email?" is the right question. Anything less from a startup is leaving money on the table.

gaius• 17 years ago

I have to tell myself "You are not the average user!" three times a day

Exactly. I generate an awful lot of HTML email - it goes to people who want to open their Outlook in the morning and have a bunch of stuff summarized in graphs and tables. It's trivial to generate reports this way. Weirdly some people prefer their reports as an email saying "please see attached report" and the content itself in a PDF! That's easy enough too tho' shrug

Sukotto• 17 years ago

Just beware blackberry users. Their email clients suck donkey dong. Some newer clients can handle basic html formatting (tables et.al.) though they still can't wrap text in a pleasing way.

I got burned by this earlier in the year when I made the mistake of assuming business people would be able to read html-formatted email (and they were all on BB)

The old chestnut about "assume" making an "ass of you and me" is true :-(

sketerpot• 17 years ago

I like having the ability to include basic formatting in emails, like italics. What I really want is not HTML email, but Markdown email. That would be just about perfect.

twopoint718• 17 years ago

That's what enriched text was supposed to be for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_text . I say "supposed" because it seems that it has not really caught on. I consider HTML to be inappropriate for e-mail. Seems to be down at the moment, but http://www.avernus.com/~gadams/essays/20020418-html-mail.htm... is good.

Edit: fixed link

TravisLS• 17 years ago

Most CSS rules work pretty well in emails, as long as you're careful. This list details how some CSS rules work in certain rendering engines:

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/

johnl• 17 years ago

I think the guy has a monkey on his back. But I agree with him about emails being both profitable and the importance of making the end users experience a smooth one.

Rock Solid HTML Emails

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