I’ve been sending some email html to my clients and so far so good, however I am not sure I’m doing this in the best way I should, because I have found so many different informations about this: First I found the HTML Email Creation screencast that uses the “create email” action that says you have to upload the html file using Freeway; reading the knowledge base I also found the “remote resources” action and now I’ve found another action, the “Email ready html fwaction 1.3” which gives a couple of pretty good examples with and without the action and also using TextMate. The Email creation screencast recommends to use a very simple design, not too many colors, no CSS menus and also to set it as html 3.2, but the example that Email ready html gives us, is full of colors…
This is the way I am doing it and please correct me if I am doing it the wrong way:
I prepare the artwork with no CSS menus or layered items and even though I am uploading this to the same server where I have my page, I am doing this in a completely separated file and uploading this through “Fetch”. The question is: I am not sure which action I should use, if “Remote Resource” or “Create email” or “Email ready” or maybe all of them combined?
I think the main thing you need to keep in mind is that any art or images you use need an absolute path in you html code for the email.
What I have done in the past, is make my email page using tables and put in my art, images, links, etc. Then use the Remote Resources Action. This will give all your images and art an absolute path to your Resources folder.
Then I open the page in a browser and View Source. Copy the source and place it in an email )I use Thunderbird, so I click in the body ara of the email. Go to Insert>html and past.
Then I just send it off.
I haven;t used the new Create Email Action yet, so I’m not sue how that works.
Hello Robert! Thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience. I will follow this way to create my email html, although I want to know more on this new action Create Email and if it can be used together with the Remote Resources action or not
I will say that creating HTML emails in Freeway can go both ways. Sure it’s easy to drop content in and do this and that, but that screencast is a lie about being fast, fun, and easy.
Here is a top 5 list of things they don’t tell you:
Lots of additional CSS styling has to occur to prevent all of the margin’s that get added to paragraph text. Most mail clients don’t understand shorthand CSS so it’s a best practice to write out individually “Name: margin-top” “Value: 0px” through the extended window. (You’d have to go through top, bottom, left, and right values for any styling regardless if you created these in the ‘p’ tag settings.)
It doesn’t mention that you have to choose a font type, size, and color for all of your css styles that you use or it doesn’t look right regardless if you set a body tag or not.
If you want to keep your link colors in your design for hyperlinks then you have to hard-code those link colors in there because the Text Link Style action won’t do it nor will setting link styles for the page via the Inspector do anything.
You have to use the Remove Paragraph Tags action heavily period.
The outputted code is sloppy and some email clients don’t read it correctly. They use GMail in the video but you should see it in Outlook. I personally go through and correct the code since again it’s outputted sloppy and I’ve mentioned it to SP on numerous occasions. (If you ever watch the NFL here in the states, it reminds me of the ESPN segment Come On Man!)
The list could go on and on but it’s important to make sure you test in as many clients as you can both webmail and mail client (Apple Mail, Postbox). Don’t be fooled into thinking Apple Mail will be how it looks for everyone else.
Outlook 97 and up are roughly speaking the same as Netscape 2.0. A
while back, Micorsoft decided that the best way to keep people from
doing Evil Things through Outlook was to replace the fairly okay
Explorer HTML engine with the one from Word. I swear, I could not make
anything up that was that funny. Headlines of the time called out in
ridicule: “1997 called, and they want their browser back!”
There are online testing tools you can subscribe to for a fee which
will show you the difference between a standards-compliant client like
Apple Mail and the rest of the sad, sorry lot. Adobe has one, I think
there’s one at Mailchimp, too.
Walter
PS: The reason that you can’t set a style on a body tag is because an
e-mail, strictly speaking, doesn’t have one. An e-mail is not a Web
page, no matter how much HTML you put into it.
On Feb 23, 2011, at 2:29 PM, Dan J wrote:
The list could go on and on but it’s important to make sure you test
in as many clients as you can both webmail and mail client (Apple
Mail, Postbox). Don’t be fooled into thinking Apple Mail will be
how it looks for everyone else.
PS: The reason that you can’t set a style on a body tag is because an e-mail, strictly speaking, doesn’t have one.
Right, perhaps I should have reworded it as “body style” since that’s what is produced in the code there. It’d be nice if this was more simplified but I don’t think without some templates people will be able to be successful at it or understand the great amount of work that goes into it.