Creating Templates for Constant Contact or any other newsletter system requires some basic and advanced techniques in order to avoid mistakes when sending the newsletter to our mailing lists.
We can refer to many forums around and find valuable information about how to create Constant Contact newsletter templates.
Firstly, let’s take a look at the comment sent by Ezra who said:
First of all, don’t create a contact form in Photoshop unless you really need some kind of image-based design present. Even then, any text and form elements should be created in the code, either by hand-coding or by using a WYSIWYG editor. You could assemble it using Dreamweaver or a similar application (although the best way to develop this sort of page is really by using a dynamically-driven, server-side process, but that’s a longer discussion), and you should take care to make sure any text elements are styled using Cascading Style Sheets, rather than exporting custom fonts out of Photoshop. Why? First, for accessibility reasons: anyone who is visually disabled will still be able to use the form without creating a lot of extra work for you, and you can still style the elements quite creatively using CSS. Also, it will be much more easily maintainable but other developers in the future, and won’t require Photoshop to make a simple text change.
We understand that Ezra suggest to avoid images unless it is completely required for us. Those images should be sliced from Photoshop or any other image tool and the content in the newsletter template should be converted to HTML without CSS rules. That’s important, because many modern web design tools add CSS rules and most of the mailing system do not treat CSS rules since that makes the result dependant on the user’s email client.
How can you create your own templates for Constant Contact?
You can import your own custom code (HTML or XHTML) emails, rather than use the Constant Contact editor and templates to create an email. As an alternative to using your own design, you can choose from a variety of html templates and customize them later with the wizard.
Avoiding mistakes
Here are a couple of recommendations when working with Constant Contact custom template emails.
- Avoid mixing CSS and HTML.
- Use only standard HTML tags.
- Use relative URLs
- Avoid usage of Javascript
- Avoid using IFRAME since it is not supported by many email clients
- Be careful with image maps
