We've been working on a lot of HTML E-Newsletters lately and thought we would share some of the helpful resources we have found over the past few weeks.
1. Beautiful Email Newsletters Gallery
http://www.beautiful-email-newsletters.com/
BEN is a gallery site dedicated solely to email newsletters. Great source for inspiration if you are looking to break outside the normal 'mold' of newsletter designs.
2. Mailchimp Email Templatesmailchimp templates
http://www.mailchimp.com/resources/html_email_templates/
I've been using these basic templates from MailChimp for a while. They take the guesswork (and time) out of creating a basic layout for your newsletter. Great way to get a head start on your e-news project.
3. Litmus
The most difficult aspect of coding e-newsletter is making it look nice in each email client. This is far more difficult than wrestling with IE6. Most of us don't even have access to all the email clients that exist. This is where Litmus steps in. Litmus will render your email in:
- Apple Mail 3
- Apple Mail 2.1
- Lotus Notes 8
- Lotus Notes 7
- Lotus Notes 6.5
- Outlook 2007
- Outlook 2003
- Outlook 2002/XP
- Outlook 2000
- Thunderbird 3.0 Beta
- Thunderbird 2.0
- AOL Mail
- Gmail
- Gmail (older version)
- Live Hotmail
- Mail.com
- Mobile Me
- Yahoo! Mail
- Yahoo! Mail Classic
4. Email Standards
http://www.email-standards.org/
Want to know why Gmail is eating your lovely background images? Or why is apple mail 3 not supporting inline css? Check out The Email Standards Project and find out about all those lovely quirks of almost every email client (desktop and web) under the sun.