Don't waste your time with HTML newsletters. Find out why.
If you have a newsletter, or plan to start one up, you may be wondering if you can send out those ‘pretty’ HMTL ezines. Well, of course you can. But SHOULD you?
If how you spend your time is important, then I think not.
When crafting a text-only newsletter, you take time to outline, draft, and edit your work. When it’s correct, you format a 65-character line length to prevent email ugliness, and voila! your email newsletter is ready to send.
However, if it’s going out as HTML, you’re not done yet. Not by a long shot.
First, you have to create a web page to hold your text. Even if you have a pre-made template with your logo and other graphics ready to go, you still need to format headings with the correct fonts, and that’s only if you’re using cascading style sheets. If you don’t use CSS, you’ll probably have to add more than just the header tags.
Next, you’ll need a weekend - a week if you’re a newbie - to
sort out how individual email clients and Internet service providers handle various HTML codes and objects.
Some email clients can’t read HTML email at all, while others accept only a limited number of codes and tags. AOL is particularly finicky.
If you want to reach your subscribers who use AOL, you need to know that the following HTML objects are not supported by the AOL client mail.
· ActiveX · Audio · External Style Sheets · Frames and IFrames · Java · Meta Refresh · Scripts: JavaScript, VBScript, Perl, etc. · Tooltips · Video
Seems simple enough, doesn’t it? Just use pure HTML and avoid the bells and whistles.
Not so fast! To get the body portion of the page to render correctly, you’ll have to include a MIME-type header, which is used to send non-ASCII information, and allows email programs to display images instead of a garbled mess that looks like this:
#&½A÷ÁdÚLìõAÓm0``g´À’¨LI¹Àµ:¿Ei£ñãsÉ ¶=r`f×!!gi9aã-
Written by: Rosalind Gardner
