How to make an email template for gmail using HTML and CSS
Solution 1
Whether you prefer to code an email by hand, or use a pre-existing template, there are a few rules to keep in mind in creating an HTML email:
- Utilize Tables in your Layouts
- Fixed-Width Positioning (for non-responsive emails)
- Pixel Units
- The Possibilities with CSS (check Ultimate Guide to CSS link below)
- Inline CSS
- Anchor Links Best Practices
- Test in All Major Clients
- Always Offer Web-Based Views
- Adding Image Content
- Avoid the Spam Folder!
- Add Un-Subscribe Option
Take a look at these sites for more info on this subject:
How to Code HTML Email Newsletters
9 Tricks to Design The Perfect HTML Newsletter
How To Code An Email Newsletter in 6 Simple Steps
The Ultimate Guide to CSS - A complete breakdown of the CSS support for every popular mobile, web and desktop email client
Solution 2
A very useful book that I used before I start a job is:
Modern HTML Email - Jason Rodriguez
There are very few books on writing HTML for email, so this is one of the only decent ones I found!
Whenever I start making an email, I use a starting point such as this below:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<style type="text/css">
body{-webkit-text-size-adjust:none;}
.ReadMsgBody{width:100%;}
.ExternalClass{width:100%;}
.ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div {line-height: 100%;}
</style>
</head>
<body style="padding:0px; margin:0PX;" bgcolor="">
<table width="100%" align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bgcolor="" style="table-layout:fixed; margin:0 auto;">
<tr>
<td width="640" align="center" valign="top">
<!--Insert content here-->
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
This includes some fixes, such as a 100% wrapping table on the outside which means that Yahoo! will not left align your email and a fix for the line-height issue in Outlook.com, where Outlook.com makes all line-heights 131%. The width included in here is 640, which gives the email a fixed width for desktop and is normally 600-700px.
Tables should be used at all times, and tables contain rows and columns (<tr> and <td>). Tables can be nested within eachother:
<table width="" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td>
<table width="" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td></td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
Each row within a table needs to have the same number of columns, otherwise columns within a row will need to be nested within a table. Tables can also be stacked, so within a <td>, you can have multiple tables that will stack vertically without the need of rows. The content, such as text or images goes within a <td>.
All CSS styling should be inline:
<td align="right" style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:11px; line-height:14px; color:#fffffe; text-align:right; text-decoration:none; font-weight:normal;">Hello</td>
aritroper
Updated on June 29, 2022Comments
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aritroper almost 2 years
I was wondering how I could design an email template using HTML and CSS and then incorporate that into an email. I want to do it as other companies do when they send confirmation emails and newsletters.