Coding like it's 1999, email signatures and newsletters

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1

I never thought I would need to know old-school HTML, but it appears that my old days coding are not over with email and newsletters.

I created my first email signature, but I am not very confident on my skills, considering it’s from back in the day when I was a teenager and my main priority was anything but work.

I used the following conventions.

  • no nested tables
  • no css floats
  • font attributes instead of styles
  • inline css, no external css
  • tables and marged cells

Here is a link to my signature - http://tinyurl.com/7rgumxa

I know old-school coding is hard, but I don’t feel it should be ugly because it’s hard. Is there any problems out there that can help me code modern, then convert to old-school code? Or will I simply have to do the same as I did for the signature. I would dread what one would have to charge to do an email newsletter.

My main sources of education were:

I am sure there are people in this world who just do newsletters and email singatures all day long, but it’s just not what I do. If anybody has any tips or hints I could learn from this which would improve my coding skills please let me know.

PS: Been a while since I coded like this.

Kind regards,
Sega

2

Email newsletters are really rudimentary. Keep it super simple.

Some clients like gmail won’t support background images.
Outlook doesn’t support margins on images only hspace and vspace.
Make good use of deprecated parameters.
Some clients don’t support anchor links though they are often used.

For testing I uses this service: http://www.emailonacid.com/
Some of the worst renderers are the last two versions of Outlook. Outlook 2003 was actually better.
A lot of people check their email on mobile devices. So keep that in mind.

3

Yep, just found emailonacid, I’ve already checked it.

I understand what you mean, this is probably why many email newsletters I’ve seen have solid images as oppose to html and are almost always in table-layouts. I’ve already updated it and checked it on emailonacid and it seams to look fine. I’ll no doubt purchase some credit to the final checks in all the browsers.

Thanks for your help.