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The unruly beast of cms newsletters

It is that time again, companies across the country sending out e-newsletters to mostly unwilling recipients. One of the companies I work for offers a third party newsletter service with a well known UK provider, in an ideal we world we would design the newsletter, build the templates, set up the account and send the clients off on their merry way to set up their own monthly newsletters. Unfortunately month after month client ring up in a panic “it’s broken again!!”. Upon investigating this you find that they have deleted half the table and the layout can only be described polity as a mess. Email newsletters for me have always been a constant form of frustration, since Microsoft decided that a background image in an email could infect and bring down an entire computer, we have been forced into producing table-based layouts. This again caused me issues, I’m one of those new fangled web designers who only knows “CSS = good, Tables = bad” but after some hard work and frustration I was producing lovely table-based emails, ready for clients to break by pasting in half a web page (including javaScript) then phoning up in a panic because the whole system has stopped working. Most months emails come back to me in such a state that the only way to fix them is to start again, so essentially writing the clients emails for them each month.

I know that these systems are good, I personally find them really easy to use, but I have an understanding of tables, how they work and the knowledge of html so I can never go wrong with them. If a client had that level of understanding then they too would find it simple and easy to use, but with that level of understanding there would be no need for them to be using a content managed system for producing emails.

Tags: cms, e-newletter, newsletter, website

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 20th, 2010 at 1:29 pm and is filed under e-newsletter design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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