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.

I came across this neat little flash built color application this morning made by Adobe, which allows you to create color palettes and save and adjust them on the fly. I have seen tools like this before but the interesting thing about this one is the ability to save color palettes into a community and then rate them.

It takes a few minutes to get used to the interface, but there are some pretty handy features, like create a palette from a rule which includes Analogous, Monochromatic, Triad, Complementary, Compound, Shades and Custom. When you adjust your base color it changes the other colors in the rule to give you a full palette.

Check it out at kuler.adobe.com

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

Web design is still evolving and will continue to evolve for a long time. However there are some basic rules that have been developed about what works best and what doesn’t so far. In this article I outline a few of the basic mistakes that can be found everywhere on the web today.

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When developing an email message that uses graphics, take the time to specify the width and height of each image within it. Using the dimensions will ensure that the images do not become lumped horizontally side by side as well as shift around when the image loads. Images and messages will also load faster as the computer will not have to determine their placement. The width and height attributes use pixels for measurement, and can be added within the image tag.