Marknet Group Blog

As Creative Director, I have had the pleasure of being part of a team of people working on the design and development of most projects that MarkNet Group is contracted to work on. Lately, I have been working on the development of e-newsletter templates for a number of our clients. While doing so, unfortunately, I’ve come to realize that not all e-mail programs view e-newsletters the same way.

Here are just a few pointers to keep in mind:

Gmail removes anything before the body tags, so you will need to use “inline CSS” by adding a style inside an HTML element. All you have to do is specify the desired CSS properties with the style HTML attribute.

For example:

<p style=”background: blue; color: white;”>A new background and font color with inline CSS</p>

A new background and font color with inline CSS

Gmail doesn’t show the CSS style: font-family. You can use the HTML tag “font face” instead of, or in conjunction with your “font-family” CSS tag.

So you can specify font in two ways:

<p style=”font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”><font face=”Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”>Specifying fonts</font></p>

<p><font face=”Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”>Specifying fonts</font></p>

Outlook 2007 doesn’t support background urls, so it is better to embed images. If you had planned on using an image as background and add “live” text over it, you will need to add the text to the graphic itself. This can become an issue if you had planned on changing this text on each issue of your e-newsletter.

Outlook 2007 doesn’t support “alt” text for images. Try using “title” instead.

One thing to always keep in mind, is to create both html and plain text versions of your e-newsletters.

If you or your organization needs e-newsletter service, we can create a template for you that will work on all e-mail programs.

Before I launch into the Wonderful World of CMS, Let me introduce myself.

My Name Is Kalen. My main two roles are providing inhouse server administration, IT technician, and Customer Support. I’m not very adept at writing autobiographies or being descriptive about oneself, so I’ll not bore you. I’m more inclined to simply state my name, and follow everything up with, “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” So enough about me.

Here at Marknet Group We’ve been evauluating CMS solutions. (Content Management Systems). A content management system is a web framework usually built using a scripting language (PHP, ASP, PERL, Python) and a database engine. (Mysql, PostgreSQL, MSSQL). CMS allows the user to collaborate on content and data in his/her website.

As I have stated before - CMS systems are built using a scripting language and a database engine. The script parses the content from the database, into an HTML template to build static views and pages. This allows for tremendous design capability and creativity, as we can design templates for various applications and styles. CMS solutions will also enable Marknet Group to quickly and efficiently design, build, and publish websites and web applications. The user will then be able to further customize and mature the content on his/her site.

No CMS solutions are identical. I’ve seen CMS solutions range from simple - to complex, requiring a dedicated server. I feel it is critical in the success of a web design company, to develop and become experts in a CMS solution that best fits their use. That is our goal here at Marknet Group. To master some key CMS solutions, so that we might better provide to our customer base quality websites that will grow with the ever changing internet. I’m excited about some future projects we have brewing! Keep an eye on our portfolio page to see our CMS based websites and solutions!