Warning – geeky material, but if you are a graphic or web designer, this is a must read! I promise that I will tie it in with worship, though, so no worries!<\/p>\n
There might be several of you who have been asked by your churches to design a weekly email newsletter for them.\u00a0 If you are a designer that holds fast to web standards, you know what a headache email newsletters can be.\u00a0 There is not much standards support for CSS-based design so you have to make a choice:\u00a0 design your email with CSS, keeping a prominent link to the html file so that those who can’t view it correctly can click there, or go old-school and design with ugly, bloated code using tables without current standards for design.<\/p>\n
So the question is, why in the world do certain email clients not support CSS standards for emails?\u00a0 If they did, html emails would be cleaned up, viewed correctly in each mail client, have much more accessability and many more benefits.<\/p>\n
Enter email-standards.org.<\/a> Campaign Monitor, probably the best service for sending html emails has been at the forefront of fighting a battle to get web standards in email.\u00a0 I think with enough people speaking up and joining them in the fight this could happen.\u00a0 Check out their new website<\/a> and help spread the word.<\/a><\/p>\n So why does this matter for the church?\u00a0 You’re probably thinking, “Okay, who cares, it’s an email!”\u00a0 The only problem is, even emails have an effect on how people view the church.\u00a0 Undoubtedly, churches are going to use html email newsletters.\u00a0 We should learn all we can to be able to do them tastefully, in a way that will draw people to the church and not push them away.\u00a0 Instead of not caring and producing either sloppy emails or emails that clients don’t support, we should lead the way in providing the smoothest way possible to get news to the people of the church.<\/p>\n