[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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