Setting Up an HTML E Mail

HTML & CSS
1

I don’t know if what I want to do is possible or practical.

I have a rather simple HTML E mail which works fine;- basically it is all in one table with the table styled to give the right colours and positioning.

However I have a standard web page for my site with drop down menus etc. Is it possible to use this to create an e mail which I could send to clients.

The exapmle I want to use is at www.c5d.co.uk/certificatesemail.php

Any thoughts welcome as this is too hard for me !

Thanks

Antony

2

[font=verdana]That’s unlikely to be something that you can achieve reliably. Although browsers are pretty standard now in terms of rendering HTML and CSS, email clients are a long way apart and in some cases going backwards (not mentioning any names, Outlook, but we’re talking to you). Pretty much any code that you need to make an email look good and work effectively beyond using a table with sliced-and-diced images will fail on at least one major email client.

See http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/ for a good (if depressing) guide to what CSS works on which email clients.[/font]

3

Thanks for the response, depressing though it may be.

What would be the best way to proceed then ?

Back to a table with all the CSS Style at the top of the page ?

Or is there no hope ?

Thanks

Antony

4

Pretty much, yes :frowning:

5

Actually, quite a few email clients strip out any CSS at the top of the page, so a more reliable solution—horrible though it be—is to use inline styles on everything.

Mind you, perhaps it’s best to let crumby email clients fail like this, so that people will stop using them. (I don’t think it’s going to happen any time soon, though, and if you are doing this for paying clients, they probably won’t be too happy to be sending out broken email templates.)

6

OK, I have modified this a bit.

What I should like to know is, Is it possible to modify the html on the web page www.c5d.co.uk/potential.html so that the middle section acts as a drop down menu when the mouse hovers over it ?

I want this to be in styled in the table if at all possible

Thanks

Antony

7

Is this still for an email, or a different topic now? You can certainly have a drop down on a web page, but not in an email.

Why? That’s the wrong use for a table.

8

Yes it is still for an e mail.

Which is why it needs to be in the table. I know it can be done in a table if there is some CSS in the head of the doucment, but that’s what I am trying to avoid

Thanks for the reply

Antony