[thelist] OT: HTML Emails
Sam-I-Am
sam at sam-i-am.com
Thu Nov 6 09:27:30 CST 2003
Steve Abaffy wrote:
> Hello,
>
> We have just been asked by a client to produce an html email. And since we
> have never done anything like this before we were wondering what the going
> rate was for something like that. Any insight from any of you that have done
> or are doing html emails would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thank you.
>
>
You need to set up a different test environment - supply yourself with
all the common email clients, and accounts on the bigger webmail
clients. Dont skip the Mac clients - they can yield nasty surpises. And
you need a way to dispatch your html mail to all these. This took me a
couple of days the first time around - you might want your client to
take on some of this cost.
Other than that, you need follow some basic rules of thumb (or best
practices if you feel that way about html mail :)
. send with a text/html header.
. dont let outlook do it for you - check the code even if you don't
write it yourself
. nothing outside the <body> tags that you care about
. all paths (imgs etc.) full and absolute.
. judicious use of inline css
. font tags where necessary
. narrow page width (I think I used 516px as a compromised low-ish
common denominator)
. Some no-html friendly text in a comment at or near the top of the page.
Once you factor this in, charge as you would for a regular (one-off) web
page. If you expect repeat work using the same template, you might price
accordingly.
And take everything you read and hear with a pinch of salt (as always).
Your client will insist they only care about Outlook users. Everyone
else will insist abandon the idea entirely.
BTW html email is not OT for this list, though the flame wars it prompts
probably should be.
Sam
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