Email design is a whole different ballgame to web page design. You can basically forget or your lovely CSS and separation of style & content, and rewind back to the table-based layouts you’d have used last decade.

Outlook 2007 has added even more problems so it seems like the situation is getting worse rather than better.

This is cut & pasted from our email coding service, if any reader doesn’t know what it all means, you should probably hire a pro to create your first email template:

“As most email applications have limited CSS support we always use a table-based markup with styles, limited by CSS 1 standard, without using background images. For such markup all the CSS styles are always put inside the HTML code (inside the body tag). The markup, performed by us for the email clients conforms to HTML 3.2 standard.

Before ordering the development of the email template please make sure that your design conforms to the markup restrictions for email, which are stated above, and that it doesn’t contain background images.”