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	Tips / Resources for creating templates

Solution Coding templates for any newsletter can be a daunting task, especially considering the number of email clients available today. The following is a list of tips and resources for "Best practice" coding of templates, to get the expected result.

Tips:

Design width. Generally speaking there is NO standard width for a newsletter, but a narrow design is always safer than one that is too wide. The best design is one that uses a liquid/elastic layout which can stretch to accomodate the recipients' viewing pane.
ALT tags on images. 99.9% of the time images will not display until the user selects the option to download them. This is shakey ground, as if the company that the email is coming from can't be quickly identified, you're beautifully crafted email will end up in their spam folder.
Progressive Enhancement. It is very important to use a Progressive Enhancement approach when coding a template as not all XHTML / CSS elements and selectors are supported by email clients. (see resources for more information on this subject)
Testing. Always check your designs in at least the top 5 email clients (i.e. Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc...)
Serving images. Make sure that if you are going to use images in the design that they are in a publicly accessible folder and are as small as possible.