This book is perfect if you are a designer or developer who is ready to expand the range of services you provide to clients. All aspects of planning, designing, and building HTML email are covered — with plenty of eyecandy to ignite your creativity.
Authored by expert HTML email designer Mathew Patterson of Campaign Monitor, this book will solve your HTML email dramas.
This book will help you:
* Make your messages more readable and attractive
* Code emails without "pull-your-hair-out" frustration
* Combine stunning looks with maximum compatibility
* Begin selling HTML email services to your clients
Sounds great. I’ve experienced the frustration a few years ago trying to get a decent looking newsletter.
I managed to get the plain text version easily enough. But the HTML !! OMG it took all I could do just to get a few simple mark-up tags for text decoration into it let alone anything even remotely looking like an HTML “page”.
The experience was so painful I’ve put off revisiting ever since.
But if this book is anything like SitePoint’s other great offerings I’ll finally be able to get a really nice newsletter out!
The author’s site is the only one I’ve gone to for learning about placing images in HTML email. I don’t work enough with email to warrent getting a book, but if I did, I’d get it purely on the strength of the author.
Does this book provide information on how to send the emails?
I’ve had no problems creating emails with both an HTML and a plain text portion (I’ve written a PHP script that reads in the HTML and plain text portions, then does variable substitution so I can personalise the email, then mime encodes it and sends it). But the tricky bit is how to send thousands of emails. My web host said “no” when I asked if I could send out 50,000 emails from a database of subscribers (the subscribers had all opted in to receive my emails).
Also handling bounce backs can be tricky due to the way that every email server seems to use different error codes and messages!
@aweb4u: The short answer is no. This is definitely a designer-oriented book, so we don’t go into server-side code. That said, the book does mention a number of email delivery services like MailChimp and CampaignMonitor (the author works for CampaignMonitor) which are built specifically for that purpose, and it also explains the advantages of using such a service over delivering your own emails (the services handle keeping their servers on whitelists and off of blacklists, deal with spam complaints, provide in-depth stats for your campaigns, manage your subscriber lists, etc.)
Unless you’re building such a system yourself that you plan to charge for, when delivering email for your clients it’s almost always a better idea to rely on a service to deal with that for you. Just like how you don’t host all your clients’ sites on a server sitting in your basement and instead outsource hosting to companies that specialize in dealing with that problem.
Hi there, I just bought this book, and I’m quite excited about offering HTML emails to clients. I’m new to HTML, but so far so good.
My problem is that the book doesn’t tell me how to send my newly created HTML email. I’m sitting with an html file and a folder with images used in my HTML. What now?
I understand that services like Campaign Monitor and MailChimp handles the sending out of HTML emails, but until I investigate those services in-depth, I just want to be able to send my HTML email to myself, while I’m learning.
My email client is Mozilla Thunderbird, and I saw that there is an option for inserting HTML, but none of the images then obviously displays.
I think one has to have it online, and then somehow have the online content display in someone’s email, but I don’t know how to do that.
If you just want to test, then sending an HTML email from Thunderbird is one option, though it’s worth noting that Campaign Monitor will allow you to send email for free to up to 5 recipients at a time.
For images, you’ll need to have them hosted online already. So, for example, for our newsletters here at SitePoint, we upload our images to our servers or to Amazon S3, and then in our template we use (for example) http://static.sitepoint.com/image.jpeg as the src or background-image reference in our template. Images don’t get sent along with the email (unless you enclose them as attachments, but as the book mentions that’s not reliable), so the only real option is to host them.
I have been playing with the modern_henchman_template.html file. Trying to modify it to make my own template. It works great as long as I keep the images in the image directory.
But since it’s an email html file I can’t send the newsletter to all my club members, because the images are on my local linux machine. I tried putting them on my web site, but still can’t get them to work. I think it has something to do with the class function in css.
Any help would be great.
Thanks
If I want to test my new skills by creating a Christmas email I want to send to friends and family, I have my hosting account so I can upload all the files and images, how can I send this email campaign from my home computer - or is that not even possible? Right now, I’m using Outlook 2010, and I can certainly download t\Thunderbird (or whatever else I might need) - but do I need to.
In case someone’s wondering – pasting the pretty HTML stuff into an email body and emailing it to yourself does NOT create a nice email, it just sends out the HTML.
