Unfortunately I must admit that a nicely formatted HTML email looks rather better and more catchy as a newsletter than a simple string of plain text. This goes against my general email preference, but even I have relented in recent times and started allowing my mail client to display HTML email (although I still never send it)!

So with this in mind, I have been spending time this week working on the first SupaJam newsletter.

I started out with a nice big graphic from our designer that provided the layout and all the images to be used, plus the copy from David. Taking these parts and creating a nice (self-contained, with embedded styles) web page that looked almost identical to the original design only took a couple of hours.

Then I emailed it to myself. And cried!

It would appear that many email clients really don't support much HTML at all and sadly even less CSS...

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/

http://www.onenw.org/toolkit/guidelines-for-css-and-email-newsletters

With a slightly painful learning curve, another day or so of effort and lots of trial, error and cursing, I do finally have a newsletter that looks a little bit like the original design and displays (fairly) consistently across all of the web browsers and email clients I have available to test with.

Thankfully it will be another month before I get to do this again and with some luck we'll stick with the same template.