Best Practices for Coding HTML Emails, part 1

HTML code for email newsletters is a deceptively complex art, and ensuring your beautiful concept looks as intended in the plethora of different email clients and platforms can cause real headaches. In this series we’ll take a look at some html email coding best practices, to find out what can really help to make your mailing render properly without it taking an age to code.

Get dirty in the code

You have to hand code emails – coding using WISYWIG will add a ton of erroneous code that’ll lead to frustration trying to get your build to render correctly. Dreamweaver can be a good tool but make sure you still code things yourself. Don’t ever use word. Ever.

Tonight we’re gonna code HTML like it’s 1999

In web coding there’s been a revolution in recent years – CSS and XHTML allows you to split content from layout and formatting, which makes coding a lot more versatile, lighter weight and easy to work with. Unfortunately, coding standards for email are still a long way behind this, for various reasons, and essentially the best way to ensure your design renders properly across most email clients is to code “old school” html, using tables to create the layout.

Look out for more HTML Email code best practice in forthcoming weeks!