Tilka Design has been creating some nice templates for email newsletters and marketing. We’ve managed to get some fairly complex layouts working for everything from Entourage to Outlook 2007. Getting css layouts to behave across multiple platforms is childs play compared to the issues one runs into with HTML emails – especially with Outlook 2007.
The Microsoft HTML reference for Outlook 2007 makes for some scary reading. What it’s boiled down to for me is going back to the IE5 days of tables and spacer images to make the elements behave. Forget being able to assume that your width and height properties will actually work. Add to that the complete lack of background image support for anything but the body tag and it makes for lots of rowspan and colspan hell.
For email marketing platforms – Mailchimp is the winner hands down in my opinion. I haven’t had a chance to play with constant contact – but building usable templates in Mailchimp is much easier that myemma.com or exacttarget.com and their inbox inspection service is a huge timesaver. We’ve played with phplist as an alternative that we can run locally – but the features and usability of Mailchimp make it a good value.
Check out some of Tilka Designs Email Pieces