Email designers are up in arms today at the release of Outlook 2007. Up until the latest release of this software Outlook 2007 was using Internet Explorer’s rendering engine but with the latest changes it drastically reduces Outlooks capability to render properly marked-up semantics based CSS/XHTML.

Some sites have even gone as far to say that Microsoft’s latest change to the software Takes email design back 5 years.

It is sad that Microsoft is this out of touch with web/email developer’s today. Most every web developer I know has for the last few years been recommending FireFox and Thunderbird for web and email browsing solely because Microsoft makes inferior web products.

The new Outlook will use Word’s HTML rendering engine, the CSS properties that this engine currently supports can be found on their site.

Alot of email designers are acting like this is the end of the world, it isn’t. Table based design is just as easy and efficient as CSS design and will work in this engine. CSS unfortunately has never been supported fully across the board in email clients. Even in prior versions of Outlook and most other browsers a stylesheet hack is needed to get minimal support.

You would think that Microsoft would have taken the opportunity to become a leader in CSS support as they did have one of the better browsers for it…

I wonder if perhaps they have an upgrade to the HTML rendering engine in Word in progress though, or if they will be releasing some kind of newsletter service sometime soon, as in the current climate the change seems utterly incomprehensible and absurd to anyone in the world of email marketing.

In today’s inbox environment more than 50% of readers use the preview pane to decide if they want to read your message. The horizontal preview pane is most popular by a margin of 3 to 1. As well over 95% of email clients block images. This means the most valuable real estate in their inboxes is going to be at most 650 pixels wide by 225 pixels high positioned at the very top.

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The Web browsing Audience today mainly uses 2 browsers, FireFox (27%) and Internet Explorer (55%) where as depending on your email list the majority of your messages could be rendering in up to 10 different email clients. This is the biggest challenge and difference between Web Design and Email Design.

Email Design and Web Design do have one thing in common though - and that is to make the design as accessible as possible, here are 5 ways to avoid designing inaccessible email.

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You’ve probably heard of the Poynter Institute’s now infamous Eyetrack studies that reveal how visitors to your website scan pages, what they focus on and what they miss. These are the studies that first revealed the issue of banner blindness in 1999. The last Eyetrack Study (Eyetrack III) was released last year and contained over 300 pages of in depth information of value to Internet marketers. Every time I revisit it, I glean some new tidbit of very useful information.

This week’s revelation comes courtesy of SiteProNews – smaller font sizes encourage visitors to read more and scan less. Yup – reducing the font size on your website might get your readers to focus on the content of your page rather than scanning the headlines. And, on the topic of headlines – underlined headings can discourage visitors from (gulp!) reading the paragraphs that follow.

I’m looking forward to the next update – Eyetrack 2007 due out early next year.

Related Links:
1. Poynter Article: EyeTrack ‘07: New Study Probes Online and Print
2. SiteProNews Article: See Your Website Through Your Visitors Eyes

How much attention do you pay to the alt tags in your HTML code? Many email designers either omit them altogether or insert the file name. But with the move to disabling graphics in preview mode, alt tags have become a critical strategic tool to increase response to your email messages.

An Alt tag is simply a brief text phrase that describes the image. It displays when you mouse over an image or when the image doesn’t load. Whether your image is a navigation button, promotional offer or a company logo, the alt tag helps give the reader some idea of what they’re missing. A well-crafted alt tag can encourage readers to download images, or even click right through to your offer from the preview screen. And it couldn’t be easier – just add alt=”Your Description Here” to any tag. It’s as simple as that.