Export html to be used in a mass emailing program. Anything new?

[jimhanus]

This has been discussed before, and I don't think it was really resolved. I need to design a page to be sent in a mass emailing program and couldn't get it to work properly designing in Xara. I think it was mentioned before to use Google's Chrome html or something similar. Has anyone had any more luck using either XX5 or now WD6 to design a single page for emailing purposes? I've used FrontPage before successfully but everything I do now is in Xara and it would be so much easier!

Jim

[pauland]

The html export is fundementally unchanged - it uses features not supported by email clients and is not suitable for html emails.

[ChrisBro]

Paul is right Jim, the generated code is just not suitable for email's well not without a lot of re-coding but if your going to do that you may as well code it from scratch.

If this is something you really need to be doing I would consider hosting them online then you can design away in Xara until your little heart is content no doubt making some awesome looking newsletters then simply send a plain old txt email message to your subscriber list with a decent "dangled carrot" from the newsletter and then the link to the newsletter online, there are a lot of pro's to doing it this way from a statistics point of view and also you need to bear in mind that nearly all email clients dont display html emails "properly" within the inbox anyhow you usually have to give permission for any mimages etc to be downloaded before you actually see the html based message.

I would try self hosting online first, it all depends on the target audience, if they are marketing emails with affiliate links etc then you want the info in the inbox where it can be seen straight away, many "big" email marketers still use normal text based emails with great effect, if it is a factual newsletter then self host it and maybe also consider offering a download pdf option as well.

It "could" be done with Xara but by the time you have finished re-coding to make it work it really wouldn't be worth it.

Another option would be to look at some of the online hosted newsletter managers one of the most respected being Aweber.com about 20 dollars a month but they handle everything online from a library of hundreds of templates to enterting your own html then fantastic tracking and click thru's as well.

Hope that helps

Chris