Design restrictions

Are there any design restrictions for HTML-based emails?

In a word (or two): normally YES. This is due to certain technical issues with HTML which are described below.

HTML emails and Web pages are often designed using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a mechanism for adding style elements like fonts and colors to HTML documents. A recent survey of business to business users (EmailLabs 2005) found that more than 75% use some version of Outlook to read their email, while 9% use Lotus Notes.

The good news is that Outlook's support for CSS is quite good. Many consumer-based email clients, such as Yahoo! Mail, AOL and Gmail, also support CSS.

The bad news? Lotus Notes and other email clients (including Hotmail) do not fully support CSS.

So, if you know that all of your email readers use Outlook, Yahoo, AOL or Gmail, you can use CSS to make your email more visually appealing. However, the reality is that there is usually no way of knowing what email client all of your subscribers are using to read their email.

Because of these issues, ThinkSend designers and programmers generally implement our customers' email design layouts with HTML Tables instead of CSS. In-line CSS may be used for specifying fonts and colors only. If the HTML Fonts command will be used instead of CSS, we stick with what is known as Web Standard Fonts.

Since HTML Tables are used for design layout instead of CSS, and many email clients do not support background images within Tables the same way, the design can subsequently NOT have gradient images used behind the marketing text. Backgrounds behind standard HTML text, should be solid colors only.

Also, your core marketing text should NOT be implemented as a graphic image (or button/icon) because many email clients restrict the display of images, relating to Anti-Spam measures. Because of this, most of your email marketing message should be implemented using standard HTML text and Web Standard Fonts.

Although not using gradient backgrounds behind text, and using HTML Tables and only in-line CSS may reduce the quality of the design in some cases, it's the best way to ensure that all of your subscribers can read your message in an acceptable format.