Have you ever wondered why some email newsletter look very poor? It is unlikely they were designed to look like this. They look poor because of the differences in the way different email clients show the styling used within HTML emails.
These differences can make huge differences to appearance and they make coding effective HTML newsletters very difficult for those not familiar with HTML style elements. This article looks at some of the major differences.
Basic layout is one of the most important things, yet Outlook 2007 and Lotus Notes (pre version 8 ) do not support ‘floats’, which are often used to layout elements in a modern website. This can give some nasty surprises in layout.
Those with more HTML email coding experience are aware you should forget about modern webs design and code the HTML email using outdated table design. But how many are aware that support for styling within the basic table elements varies between email clients? The border-collapse style (very important for spacing out an email nicely) is not supported in Yahoo classic. If you use Yahoo and ever wondered why your emails looked strange this is a key culprit. Border spacing is completely variable with bout half email clients supporting it and half not. All flavours of Outlook and Lotus notes ignore this one along with AOL and Hotmail, but Yahoo allows this one to be used.
Treatment of empty cells in a table is another inconsistent minefield, but generally the more business like email clients do not allow this but the webmail type clients do.
What about the positioning of text within a table? Do you want it at the top or in the middle? Or maybe varying depending on how you view the email? The latter is easy to do as the vertical align style is treated differently with Outlook2007 being inconsistent with the rest.
Is styling the text any easier? The good news is that the colour of the text is treated the same in all commonly used email clients. But there is a string in the tail. The background colour is not treated the same! In this case it is Lotus Notes and Hotmail that are different.
Many people try using a background images, and this was popular a few years ago with outlook 2003, AOL, Yahoo and Apple all supporting this. But then Outlook 2007 arrived and this does not support this feature so the difficulties grew.
Confused? The above are about one third of the inconsistencies we know about; indeed many styles are so unpredictable they are unusable within HTML emails.
Many people are unaware the that their carefully crafted emails do not look good in different email clients. Whenever we provide an email marketing account for a client we always set this up with some example HTML templates which work as understanding the styling complexities is not for the faint hearted.