After last week’s “slice fail” and general spinning of wheels at Sailthru, I felt quite a bit more comfortable coding up html emails this week, which was the bulk of our workload.
We learned a key lesson last week, that it’s always better to code emails fresh and not rely on any kind of quick fix html export. With that in mind, I dug into the code with purpose and I was actually able to churn out two solid templates in a much shorter time than the last full template I attempted. Although it was still a pretty tedious process, I definitely felt like I was getting the knack for it and picking up some little tricks along the way. In fact, I even surprised myself when I was able to quickly dig into someone else’s rather messy code and handle a few quick fixes for an account manager who was in a time crunch. While I don’t see myself wanting to code html emails all the time, I do like being able to chalk it up as a useful arrow in my quiver of web dev tools.
Of course, all that said, I definitely hit a few snags along the way and I already got the request from a client for a bunch of edits on both of the templates I built. It’s nothing major, but I think it just serves as a nice reminder that nothing’s perfect…even after you’ve tested it perfectly in every email client and every major web browser, someone might just need something tweaked or want something re-vamped. And getting the design right is all fine and dandy, but it’s hard not to take it as a slight criticism of your work, even if it was their team that designed the thing!
So I don’t have all that much more to report beyond that, but here are a few animated gifs that sort of sum up the week quite nicely:
Ok, let’s do this…
Yeah, I got this…
wait, maybe not…
kind of sums up coding html emails…
