I recently started working at a small granola company.  And when I say small, I mean I’m basically the only employee and we make the granola in the woman who started the company’s garage. Anyway, she wanted to know if I wanted to do more at the company than just mix, bake, and package the granola, and talked about how she wanted to send out a fancy HTML email like other professionals do. At the time I had just started learning HTML, but I’m a strong Googler and figured I could look anything up.

What I found was that there is no easy way to mock up an HTML email template that can be used over and over again (say, in Photoshop) and them import it into a mail client for use.  In every case, HTML, and consequently CSS, needed to be used. Everyone was coding. There’s no “save as” HTML function, and the slicing that some people do is complicated and not always terribly effective, leading to lots of bugs.

The email that I first drew up was easy enough to do in Photoshop, but positioning boxes and images all seemed really complicated. With the lessons I just took, however, I’m confident I could build it from scratch, (once I look up the hex colors). I can use margins, div positioning, clear functions, all to put every image, background color, or text box anywhere I want.

Then next step will be making it into a template so that anyone can edit it with and email client.  Given that all of the templates that you can download are HTML files, I’m sure there is a way to do that. I’m just going to have to learn an few more steps in order to make my skills translate into something that others who are less computer-literate can use for their business.