fonziguy

HTML emails are hard and cumbersome. With all the different email clients out there with different rendering engines and inconsistencies it’s not as easy as using modern HTML and CSS.

Postdrop helps by giving you a ready to go template and inlines your CSS so you can copy the output into your codebase or ESP. Send a test to yourself or colleagues to insure it works as expected in your email client or on your device.

This started as simple personal tool and now it has evolved to support user accounts so you can save and test all your templates in one place.

I share the sentiment and think there’s a balance.

The problem is a lot of marketers or designers go overboard with HTML emails and they’re overly designed with visuals and graphics in an attempt to look good or match their brand.

Using actual plain text is a bit of a pendulum swing in the other direction though and really restricts things, including the fact you can’t add tracking pixels to get the analytics you might need.

An HTML email that is “designed” to still look like plain text strikes a good balance I think. Allows for some visual type hierarchy improvements, allows for links with clear anchor text and utm tags and any tracking pixels you need. Easier for you the developer to maintain. While at the same time isn’t distracting to the user.

Check out this Grunt workflow https://github.com/leemunroe/grunt-email-workflow

Automates most of the painful tasks of putting an email together. You could also add a task that sends the templates to Mailchimp once built.

Even in 2017, and even with recent Gmail improvements, it is still a best practice to inline your CSS before sending email to ensure they don't fall apart in one of the many clients out there. This tool inlines your styles in real time and provides a handy preview so you can see what's happening.

Building HTML email is hard. Building responsive HTML email is even harder. But email opens on mobile are at 50% and rising. Hoping this article shares some useful advice and lessons learned.

Awesome, glad to hear that!

Hey, this is Lee. Correct. The simple responsive email template is free and open source. If you have the time, or don't have the budget, you could definitely use this as a starting point and create the rest of the templates on top of this. It took me more than a few hours though :-)

Hi, Lee here, I created BOTH of email templates you're referring to. In fact you can use my Grunt workflow to create more https://github.com/leemunroe/grunt-email-workflow/

There are several differences with the templates for sale on HTMLemail.io: More layouts, a 6 column grid, better responsive support for mobile (including Gmail apps), includes high resolution image assets for social media and app store buttons, better support across all clients including Gmail and Outlook.

Hey Matt, Lee here the creator of the templates. I've open sourced a simple basic email here (https://github.com/leemunroe/responsive-html-email-template) and also my Grunt workflow for building emails (https://github.com/leemunroe/grunt-email-workflow) if you'd like to take it for a spin.

Email is hard. Responsive email is even harder. Developers and startups often need the same set of templates to send out with their service so I put these together.

HTML email is still way harder than it should be. So I put together this basic responsive email template and just recently updated so there is better support across more clients. Enjoy.

Brain dump of notes and lessons learned for those that have little experience working with email.

[1] http://www.leemunroe.com/email-design-workflow/

Using the premailer gem for inlining CSS. Agreed would be nice not to have that dependency. Played with other solutions but couldn't find one as good.

I really like Stripe (http://stripe.com) and have always been a fan of Campaign Monitor (http://campaignmonitor.com). We've been making lots of subtle design iterations to Mailgun (http://mailgun.com) recently too.

Also I'd recommend checking out LeanStack.io (http://leanstack.io) which has a great list of SaaS companies. You might find some inspiration there.

Absolutely. I think Chartbeat does a good job of showing you the product before signing up https://chartbeat.com/demo and also https://www.intercom.io/ have a great gradual engagement flow (where they actually need data to work effectively).

There's no way to search CodeShares so only people who know the URL can access it. And only the latest instance is saved (using Firebase) so you can always delete the code once you're done with it.

http://twitamore.com

Fun/silly website for Valentine's Day. Tells you who you love on Twitter. Gets about 500k pageviews/mth 100k visits/mth and spikes on Valentine's Day with coverage from the likes of Huffington Post and TNW.

50-70% of traffic is from Saudi Arabia, which is interesting.

Gets a tonne of tweets a day if you search for #twitamore https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=%23twitamore&src=t...

I figure it would make a good marketing campaign for a company on Valentine's Day 2014 if they wanted to theme it.

Click on "Reservations Options explained"

Oh I see. Firebase is the magic behind that https://www.firebase.com/

Hmm probably not feature wise. This was hacked together on the train. One advantage though is sharing code quickly (no download or reg) in any browser.

I like it, good thinking

You should see a code editor, that looks like Sublime, that you can write or paste code into. What browser are you using?

I will definitely. Needs some clean up first.

Should work better now

Looks like a bug on first select. Should be easy fix.

Looks like Webshell is integrating APIs into your site, while Runnable is about API discovery, prototyping, learning from others (more of a Stack Overflow direction).

http://flask.io for quick to do lists.

I hacked this together and just shipped it.

There are plenty of task management apps out there but you don't have to sign up or download anything to start using this one.