Outlook 2010 Will Ignore Net Standards By Using Phrase HTML Engine

Posted on 27. Aug, 2011 by John Chang in PC Software

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It was just lately announced that Microsoft intends to proceed utilizing Phrase to edit and render HTML email in Outlook 2010. This has been greeted with cries of protest from electronic mail advertising designers the world over.

Many electronic mail advertising designers are nostalgic for the great previous days of Outlook 2003, the place Web Explorer was used for rendering HTML emails and all was good with the world. Indeed, protests have been registered in lots of on-line boards (including Microsoft’s personal) about their obvious drifting away from help for net requirements in HTML email. One of the principal launch pads for this debate has been a Twitter-based mostly call to arms by the Electronic mail Standards Project.

Nonetheless, expertise designing successful e-mail templates for quite a lot of frequent electronic mail readers, both online and offline has shown that every one is just not lost in the case of creating effectively-designed and constant-wanting emails, even for the likes of Outlook 2007 and Lotus Notes.

As a basic rule, email reader support for HTML remains to be a great distance off the support web browsers offer. This means the easiest way to ensure your intended recipients actually get their advertising and marketing emails entails:

– Conserving to a simple desk-primarily based layout, avoiding merged columns or rows – use nested tables to achieve the effect you desire;

– Don’t use fashion sheets (both included in the header or linked to separately), use simple inline type declarations as a substitute;

– Avoid utilizing fancy dynamic parts – together with JavaScript and Flash.

Outlook 2007 is completely different and you must count on Outlook 2010 to be the same…

There are a selection of further things to concentrate on when designing advertising emails for Outlook 2007 and 2010, these include:

– No support for background pictures – You won’t be able to use fancy background effects with repeated gradients and overlaid text. If you happen to still need to go down this route, be sure that an acceptable cell background color is applied so Outlook 2007/2010 users can nonetheless make sense of your email when the background image does not appear.

Word that ordinary mounted inline images can nonetheless be used, so consider carefully how one can place them for optimum effect.

In case you are desperate for text overlaying a background impact, this is really your only option.

– No support for animated .gifs – be aware that if you happen to embody animated gifs in your electronic mail advertising marketing campaign, Outlook 2007 will only display the very first body of the animation, so put your most vital message/picture at the beginning.

– Inline style border assist is erratic – significantly model borders used to outline vertical borders only. If you must use them, you can apply a mode border to the cell of a single-cell desk, otherwise count on the columns in your e mail campaign to look a bit ‘staggered’ in Outlook 2007/2010. Making use of borders to pictures (inline-style or in any other case) does not work at all.

– Restricted help for advanced CSS model attributes – together with width, top, margin, padding, float, clear.

Why use Word to render HTML emails?

A latest White Paper by Microsoft discussed using Word in Outlook 2007. It suggests it is supposed to offer a constant and familiar electronic mail expertise to all customers of Microsoft Workplace merchandise, while enabling the wealthy-textual content options of Word for the Outlook electronic mail software and improving safety by avoiding using net-browser-primarily based technology.

All this may sound fairly daunting. Nevertheless, all you have to keep in mind is to not panic. So long as you keep issues easy, take note of the record above and most significantly test, check, then test again – you should have the ability to create actually effective HTML electronic mail marketing designs with minimal bother. Not only that, you too can achieve aggressive advantage if you get your e mail designs right and your opponents don’t.

Sadly, it looks like Word rendering in Outlook is right here to remain and it is unlikely the pressure of email advertising designers might be sufficient to change things. The earlier you be taught the key abilities to designing for Outlook 2007 and 2010 the better. Your corporation, clients and clients will thanks for it.

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