CSS: What you can and can’t use in a direct email

Every decent web designer knows how to set up a website with HTML and CSS. When designing an email however a lot of things work differently. For example, when coding a website I always use divs, but with a HTML email it doesn’t work that great. It’s better to use tables for the layout!

CSS styles need to be inline to work at best, so creating a separate file for all CSS won’t get the job done when creating that cool email you want. And you guys know that browsers are rendering the code different. Well, email clients are even worse! Support for even some simple CSS varies considerably between mail clients, and even different versions of the same client.

On Campaignmonitor there’s a great list available where you can find out what each mail client supports for CSS. If you get it right in those 10 email clients, than you shouldn’t get into any problems at all and your mail will probably be handled correctly!

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 5th, 2010 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Design & Photography, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.