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SitePoint: How to Code HTML Emails

SitePoint: The Principles of Beautiful HTML Email

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The TutorialBlog team has launched a sister site dedicated to iPhone reviews called AppCraver. If you own an iPhone and are interested in reading reviews of new applications, interviews of iPhone app developers, and breaking iPhone news, go check it out. The featured article today is an interview of The Blimp Pilots, the developers of the popular iPhone app Koi Pond.

Most websites, especially if they are blogs, will come across the need for a block quote at one time or another. That’s just the inter-linking good spirit of the web! Block quotes are a way to include text on a page that is directly taken from another website (or other source). HTML provides us with the perfect element for such a task, the <blockquote>

Without any CSS applied to a page at all, most browsers have default styling applied to this element, to help set it apart from other blocks of text. Firefox uses the following styling by default:

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Polls can be a great thing for any number of different websites. They get visitors engaged quickly and so long as they are quick, they are usually pretty fun to participate in. Especially if you can see the results right away. The more you get your audience thinking about and interacting with your site, the more memorable it will be for them.

Design and Code Your Own Poll

Below are a few links to tutorials which will help you create a poll on your site from scratch, no help from outside services involved. Since polls need to store data, you will need a database and some way to interact with that. PHP is a popular choice, but any web language that can interact with a DB will ultimately work.

W3 Schools: PHP and AJAX Poll Tutorial

CSS-Tricks: How to Design and Create a PHP Powered Poll

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Longer articles/content on the web are well served by a Table of Contents. Like in a book, they increase usability by allowing readers to jump directly to specific sections, rather than laboriously scroll the entire article to find something. A typical Table of Contents rather boring, let’s spice it up a little bit with a little color and illustration!

Here is what we will build:

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The release of jQuery UI 1.5 brought with it the Themeroller, which is a quick and easy way to customize and download a set of jQuery “widgets” for use on a web page.

Simply choose from one of the pre-built themes, or adjust the settings to your own liking and download the theme. Your download will include all the files necessary to for all these widgets to work, and a demo file with all of them on one page.

In fact, these pre-built theme could serve you well as a starting point for a new design. Let’s manipulate a theme download into a basic website using the Tabs and Accordian.

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Web pages are full of buttons. Navigation, links, “next” buttons, “submit” buttons, “OK” buttons, “close” buttons… the list goes on. When you go about designing a new web page, chances are its going to have a lot of buttons. Make life easier for yourself by creating a button class that you can reuse over and over in your HTML whenever you need a button.

Not only is this a favor to you, but it’s good for your users and aesthetics as well. Consistency is a key factor in usability. Let’s get started.

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Adobe Illustrator has some cool and powerful tools for manipulating the colors in your document. Using these tools, you can achieve some very nice colorization’s even if you aren’t particularly good at choosing colors. It also becomes easier to try out different versions quickly!

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