HTML Email Tutorial - What did you think?

I'm working on a responsive email template at the moment for the first time in about a year (forgot how annoying they are!).

You should check out Ink from Zurb. Here you can find various responsive starter templates. You can copy and paste into popular campaign programmes such as MailChimp. All templates have been tested in all major email clients. You can view how each one looks in each email client, on various devices. The website has helpful documentation and tips to help you produced a good working responsive email.

So have a good inspection of the code to understand how it works and have fun customising the templates for a particular client and / or campaign.

Have fun, I know I will...

Hi Alexandra Moss, I appreciate your comments here and want you to know we're going to give the course a second look. We certainly did edit the screencast portions to speed up the process in the hopes that would provide a benefit, but perhaps we were too aggressive with it. Again, we're going to take a second look and see what we can do to improve it.

But to everyone, we appreciate the feedback here. We want to make this course - and all our courses - the best they can be. If any of you have watched by Usability course (cheap plug, I know), you'll know how important other perspectives are to ensure success!

From my point of view, the tutorial was rather a general presentation on how to create and implement a design for email given the constraints imposed by different email systems and the table-based HTML.

The CSS part confused me a bit too, but I later realized that some of it (the email system specific declarations) is pretty much identical for all responsive emails since the restrictions are already known and there are no new solutions to be used in those cases.

End of the road, building an email template is partially dependent on the platform used for sending, so each email marketing company can provide more detailed information on how to make a template that can be later customized using the default editor. MailChimp has extensive documentation here: http://templates.mailchimp.com/

On the topic of email templates, I discovered two interesting books I definitely want to check out when I finish my current readings: http://www.amazon.com/Create-Stunning-HTML-Email-Works/dp/0980576865

http://www.amazon.com/Modern-HTML-Email-Responsive-Effective/dp/0615863620/

Thanks i just finished the tutorial and is was a bit difficult to follow. Still need to practice with this a bit more.

I agree with Jenny. I also write code for custom HTML emails, and I found it hard to follow the CSS that Fabio was pasting - it was way too fast, with too little explanation of why he was doing things a certain way. There wasn't any time to try and follow along with the project files.

I liked the modular email sample that Fabio created, and I appreciate the code, but I wished that he would have circled back to the beginning, where he talked about the 3 different types of emails, and related that part of the class to the final product. I felt like it ended too abruptly, and something was missing.

Hi all -

First, thanks for your feedback; it's much appreciated. Apologies for the fast pace of the course. Unfortunately, there's so much information to cover and such a short amount of time to cover it in that the course kind of had to be a very broad one.

I'm around and more than happy to answer questions!

Thank you to everyone who's responded, and especially Fabio.

I learned a lot from the course, from client-specific styling to using a mini table to mimic a calendar. I think this course is different than the average Treehouse experience, in which you are walked through step by step. Listing it as a "Beginner" course is misleading, it should be "Intermediate" in my mind. You need to be quite familiar with HTML and CSS to even follow along.

I completed this course the other day and sadly found it a little disappointing. I managed to follow along with what was going on without too much trouble, but I have created a few html emails in the past so making this a more intermediate course is better I think.

The trouble with HTML emails is, the code has to be horrible to work. Nested tables begins to get very tricky to manage, especially with large font size to show on a video. I know from experience the code can become incredibly unmanageable very quickly so I sympathise with the fact this is a difficult topic to cover.

I think the biggest problem is that the course probably really needed to be twice as long to go into more detail and explain why things are the way they are with html email. There was a lot of code inside each of the td tags for example with no explanation of why that was there. Also, I cant remember off of the top of my head when, but I'm sure there were a couple of times when the commentary didn't match up with the video, which was pretty off putting.

I really enjoyed watching how best to break up html email into different sections. I had never approached it that way before and it definitely helps to keep track of what your code is doing so for me, this course was much more useful in planning and going about writing html email than it was actually writing the code you need.

I have to agree with the rest of the people taking this course, definitely not for beginners. It's too fast paced with Fabio just copying and pasting (without warning), I have to stop the video too often to check if there was something I may have missed him pasting in. Unfortunately, it makes it very difficult to work alongside with the project files, so much so I feel I'm not learning and more just trying to copy and figure it out later.