hatever your personal feelings are about HTML emails, they do work effectively as a communications and marketing tool. And worst of all, you can’t ignore them, you just know that at some point a client is going to ask you to create a template for them.

If you have never designed an HTML email template before you may be thinking: “Whats the big deal? You use some basic HTML with a little CSS, no problem at all!”. Little do you know that the actual design of the email is the least of your problems. When designing a web page you do need to cater for only a handful of browsers, each with there own particular little quirks. With emails, you need to design them to display properly in 50+ (!) email clients, with each one not willing to cooperate with.

There is no fun when designing an email template. You have to roll up your sleeves and test, and then test some more.

A well designed email template can be the difference between a companies success and failure, so its has to be designed right and formatted correctly.

To help you with this we have collected a huge array of email design Best Practices, tutorials (both HTML and CSS), testing tools, ready made templates (there are only a few, as most of the free templates out there look like they were all designed in the 90s) and finally some email inspiration.

Don’t forget usability and accessibility rules when designing emails, perhaps you should read these articles first: Design of Email Newsletters – Alertbox and Email Newsletters: New Results From Eyetracking and User Research.

via HTML Email Newsletter Toolbox – Tutorials, Templates and Inspiration – Speckyboy Design Magazine.