HTML email design shouldnt be difficult!
Up until six months ago or so, I was responsible for MCM's email marketing effort. We sent HTML and text emails to our opted-in users about once a week.
Before I took this task on, I thought designing web pages for all the different browsers out there was difficult. It turned out that designing HTML emails was worse. There are a lot more email clients than browsers, and all of them seem to have their own rules and quirks. Of course, there are guidelines out there to work around all of these. (I'd recommend giving MailChimp a visit for lots of good info)
After I had moved on from creating our email promotions, I came across the "Email Standards Project". This website movement aims to "work with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email". Sweet.
In addition to bringing fed-up designers together, the site uses it's version of an acid test to rate the state of all major email clients, from excellent to poor and gives full reports to boot. I'd recommend stopping by this site, saying hey, bloging or linking to it and spreading the word.
Here's to better web standards support in email clients!
Labels: Email, Marketing, Web Development