SitePoint Podcast＃58：带有Mat PattersonHTML电子邮件

Episode 58 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week, Kevin (@sentience) interviews Mat Patterson (@mrpatto) from Campaign Monitor. They discuss many things email-related, mostly the absolute nightmare it can be to design beautiful-looking HTML emails that work consistently across email clients. Thankfully, Campaign Monitor has some handy tools and templates to get you started. A complete transcript of the interview is provided below.

SitePoint Podcast的 第58集现已发布！ 本周，凯文( @sentience )采访了Campaign Monitor的 Mat Patterson( @mrpatto )。 他们讨论了许多与电子邮件有关的事情，其中​​绝大部分都是设计噩梦，即设计外观精美HTML电子邮件，这些电子邮件在电子邮件客户端之间始终如一地工作。 幸运的是，Campaign Monitor具有一些方便的工具和模板，可以帮助您入门。 下面提供了采访的完整笔录。

下载此剧集 (Download this Episode)

You can also download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:

您也可以将本集下载为独立的MP3文件。 这是链接：

• SitePoint Podcast #58: HTML Email with Mat Patterson (MP3, 36.9MB)

  SitePoint Podcast＃58：带有Mat PattersonHTML电子邮件 (MP3，36.9MB)

面试成绩单 (Interview Transcript)

Kevin: April 23rd, 2010. The pain of HTML email, and how Campaign Monitor can help turn those headaches into a healthy revenue stream. I’m Kevin Yank and this is the SitePoint Podcast #58: HTML Email with Mat Patterson.

凯文： 2010年4月23日。HTML电子邮件的痛苦，以及Campaign Monitor如何帮助将这些头痛问题变成健康的收入来源。 我是Kevin Yank，这是SitePoint播客＃58：HTML电子邮件和Mat Patterson。

And I’m joined today by Campaign Monitor’s Mat Patterson.

我今天也和Campaign Monitor的Mat Patterson一起加入了 。

Hi, Mat, how is it going?

嗨，马特，最近怎么样？

Mat: Hey, Kevin, it’s going great.

Mat：嗨，凯文，一切都很好。

Kevin: We’re here to talk about email, email, and more email today and your life just must be full of email.

凯文：今天我们在这里谈论电子邮件，电子邮件和更多电子邮件，您的生活中肯定充满了电子邮件。

Mat: My life is chockablock with email.

席：我的生活充斥着电子邮件。

Kevin: I know most of us, email is like that thing that we have to deal with in order to get our job done but on top of that, email is your job.

凯文：我认识我们大多数人，电子邮件就像是我们要完成工作所必须处理的事情，但最重要的是，电子邮件就是您的工作。

Mat: That’s right. I mean I literally would look at thousands of emails every day. Not all of them are particularly nice to look at but a lot of them are.

垫子：是的。 我的意思是我每天都会看成千上万封电子邮件。 并非所有这些都特别好看，但其中很多都是。

Kevin: Why don’t you start by telling our listeners who you are, how you got where you are and what you do now at Campaign Monitor?

凯文(Kevin)：为什么不先告诉我们的听众您是谁，您如何到达目的地以及现在在Campaign Monitor做什么？

Mat: Sure. I guess like a lot of people listening, I was a web designer by background; I kind of fell in to web design after university when web design was quite young—at least commercial web design—in 1997. I started working on a helpdesk and that job tied into being a webmaster back in the day when we actually had webmasters. I guess there’s still webmasters but I mean like government departments, which haven’t changed their naming system since 1995 but basically became a web designer through that process. I worked a few places in Sydney and then I went overseas and worked in the UK for a company, which became Cross Line UK and then back to Sydney again doing freelancing, working for myself as a web designer, contracting at different places and working a few in-house positions as well. The last one of those was actually at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, which was quite a fun place to be a web designer.

席：当然。 我想就像很多人在听的一样，我是一名背景网页设计师； 大学毕业后，我在1997年开始从事Web设计工作，当时Web设计还很年轻(至少是商业Web设计)。我开始在服务台工作，而在我们真正拥有网站管理员的那一天，这项工作就成为了网站管理员。 我想仍然有网站管理员，但我的意思是像政府部门一样，自1995年以来就没有更改过他们的命名系统，但基本上是通过该过程成为一名网站设计师。 我曾在悉尼的一些地方工作，然后去了海外，并在英国的一家公司工作，该公司后来变成了Cross Line UK，然后再次回到悉尼做自由职业者，自己担任网页设计师，在不同的地方承包工作，很少有内部职位。 最后一个实际上是在悉尼的塔龙加动物园，这对成为网页设计师来说是一个非常有趣的地方。

Kevin: Were you working all on your own there or do they have like a web team?

凯文：您是在那里独自工作还是像网络团队一样工作？

Mat: They have like an IT team basically. My position was kind of half— Through some kind of weird political system it was specified officially as being half in the marketing team and half in the IT team to the point where there was two different desks. I left there basically to come to Campaign Monitor where I’m doing a job which is not actually web design specifically. I would say it’s web design related, but at Campaign Monitor I look after all our customers and basically trying to help them as far as running the support team and also helping them build up their businesses by adding email marketing as a new service.

Mat：他们基本上像一个IT团队。 我的职位差不多是一半。通过某种怪异的政治体系，官方将其指定为营销团队的一半，IT团队的一半，以至于有两个不同的部门。 我基本上离开了那里，来到Campaign Monitor，在那里我从事的工作实际上并不是专门针对Web设计的。 我会说这与Web设计有关，但是在Campaign Monitor中，我照顾所有的客户，基本上是在帮助他们运行支持团队方面，还通过将电子邮件营销作为一项新服务来帮助他们建立业务。

Recently I’ve been writing a book for SitePoint.

最近，我一直在为SitePoint写一本书。

Kevin: Yeah, and I’m sure we’ll get you back on to talk about that book when it’s ready for people to buy.

凯文：是的，我敢肯定，当人们准备购买时，我们会让您重新谈论这本书。

Mat: Absolutely.

席：绝对。

Kevin: Coming back to Campaign Monitor, like, I don’t know, do you find this is true of a lot of your customers that email is kind of a necessary evil something that their clients want them to be able to do and their hand is forced to add that to their product offering?

凯文(Kevin)：回到Campaign Monitor，例如，我不知道，您是否发现很多客户都这样，电子邮件是一种必不可少的邪恶，客户希望他们能够做到这一点，他们的手被迫将其添加到他们的产品中？

Mat: That’s definitely true. I mean not so much necessarily their customers I think because at least the people we often deal with are the ones who’ve kind of come over to the dark side in a sense. But definitely, as far as the web design industry as a whole, there’s still a very large percentage of designers who kind of think that HTML email design shouldn’t actually exist, that it’s kind of an evil in the industry.

席：绝对是这样。 我的意思不是我想的客户，因为在某种意义上至少我们经常与之打交道的人是那种走入阴暗面的人。 但是可以肯定的是，就整个Web设计行业而言，仍然有很大比例的设计师认为HTML电子邮件设计实际上不应该存在，这在行业中是一种邪恶。

Kevin: Does this come back to the whole text email versus HTML email debate?

凯文(Kevin)：这是否涉及到整个文本电子邮件与HTML电子邮件的争论？

Mat: Yeah, it does. It’s a weird one. I think it’s somehow a bunch of people and I think it’s coming out of the web standards thing, which is weird, but it’s kind of the idea that email is meant to be text and therefore it should always be text and we shouldn’t change that. And when I do talks, I like to get and ask people upfront put your hand up if you hate HTML email and I usually get about 50/50. So there’s still some work to do there.

Mat：是的 这是一个奇怪的。 我认为这是一群人，我认为这是来自Web标准的东西，这很奇怪，但这有点像电子邮件的意思是文本，因此电子邮件应该始终是文本，我们不应更改那。 当我讲话时，我喜欢先询问别人，如果您讨厌HTML电子邮件，我通常会得到50/50的收益。 因此，仍有一些工作要做。

It’s a very odd situation actually because, of course, it’s not like the web was ever meant to have applications on it or was even meant to have shops and you could buy things from Amazon, right?

这实际上是一个非常奇怪的情况，因为，当然，这并不是说网络曾经意味着要在其上安装应用程序，或者甚至不是要有商店并且您可以从亚马逊购买东西，对吧？

Kevin: Right, right.

凯文：对，对。

Mat: It was all invented by scientists so that they could exchange scientific information but somehow we managed to move past that on the web but not so much in email, at least in people’s minds.

Mat：这都是科学家发明的，以便他们可以交换科学信息，但是我们设法以某种方式超越了网络上的信息，但在电子邮件中却没有那么多，至少在人们的脑海中。

Kevin: Yeah and to some extent, for me, it comes from the order these things were invented in. When email was invented, the web wasn’t really there as a technology; or if it was, it was a glint in someone’s eye. It hadn’t proven itself as a document language that would be embraced so universally.

凯文：是的，在某种程度上，对我而言，这是由发明这些东西的顺序决定的。当发明了电子邮件时，网络实际上并不是一种技术。 或者如果是的话，那是在某人眼中的闪光。 它并没有证明自己是一种可以被如此普遍地接受的文档语言。

Mat: True.

席：对 。

Kevin: But when we look at technologies like eBooks, the EPUB standard for eBooks now, it has been very natural for that standards body to adopt HTML as like the base language for eBooks. No one is out there saying “books should be text!”

凯文(Kevin)：但是，当我们看一下电子书(EPUB)现在的电子书(EPUB)标准之类的技术时，该标准组织很自然地采用HTML作为电子书的基本语言。 没有人说“书应该是文字！”

Mat: Yes. I do use that example myself actually is that even books which are literally just text that don’t use monospaced fonts… they use headings and spacing and nice fonts and that kind of thing just because it makes it easier to read and that’s pretty much our position at Campaign Monitor is like you might not personally want to receive that, which is fine because you should always have the choice but other people want to send nice looking emails, which are easier to read and if you don’t design them, if you as their web designers basically say hey, I don’t want to touch that, then it’s not like they’re not going to go out. It just made somebody’s marketing secretary’s going to get 10,001 pieces of clipart and stick them into a message in Outlook and send it anyway.

席：是的。 我本人确实使用了这个示例，实际上，即使是字面上只是文本的书，也不使用等宽字体……它们使用标题和间距以及漂亮的字体之类的东西，只是因为它使阅读更容易，这几乎就是我们在Campaign Monitor中的职位就像您可能不希望自己收到该职位，这很好，因为您应该始终有选择权，但是其他人希望发送外观精美的电子邮件，这些电子邮件更易于阅读，如果您不设计它们，您就像他们的Web设计师所说的那样，嘿，我不想碰那个，那并不是说他们不打算出去。 它只是使某人的市场营销秘书要获得10,001张剪贴画，并将其粘贴到Outlook中的消息中，然后以任何方式发送。

Kevin: I want to get a little disclaimer out of their way so that people know. I mean one of the reasons we’re talking to Matt today is that SitePoint uses Campaign Monitor’s service to send out all of its email newsletters, and Campaign Monitor has been kind enough to give SitePoint those services for free in return for promotional consideration you might say. We mention Campaign Monitor everywhere we can in relation to our newsletters and getting Matt on today is part of that arrangement but I certainly don’t want to make this podcast an ad for Campaign Monitor. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to dig in to some really interesting stuff like I feel we’re already doing so far.

凯文(Kevin)：我想放弃一些免责声明，以便人们知道。 我的意思是，我们今天与Matt交谈的原因之一是SitePoint使用Campaign Monitor的服务来发送其所有电子邮件新闻通讯，而Campaign Monitor足够友好地免费为SitePoint提供了这些服务，以换取您可能考虑的促销考虑说。 我们在与新闻通讯有关的任何地方都提到了Campaign Monitor，今天就加入Matt就是这种安排的一部分，但是我当然不希望此播客成为Campaign Monitor的广告。 我希望我们能够深入研究一些非常有趣的东西，就像我觉得到目前为止我们已经在做的那样。

One of the reasons we love Campaign Monitor at SitePoint and this is even before we managed to convince you to give us your services for free is because you do solve one of these hard problems that we really are glad we don’t have to solve ourselves.

我们喜欢SitePoint上的Campaign Monitor的原因之一，甚至在我们设法说服您免费提供我们的服务之前，是因为您确实解决了这些难题之一，我们真的很高兴我们不必解决自己。

Can you tell me about some of those problems that Campaign Monitor, you guys feel like you’re solving and you’re proud of that?

您能告诉我一些Campaign Monitor的问题吗，你们觉得自己正在解决，并为此感到自豪？

Mat: That’s also a common question I guess, especially for designers who are trying to sell the idea of an email marketing service to their customers is why should I pay for something which I can do for free?

Mat：我猜这也是一个普遍的问题，尤其是对于那些试图向其客户推销电子邮件营销服务理念的设计师来说，为什么我要为我可以免费做的事情付费？

Kevin: Yeah, I could open Outlook and start making things bold.

凯文：是的，我可以打开Outlook并开始将其变粗。

Mat: Yes. But there’s actually just a huge amount of work involved in, especially if you’re dealing with a list of any kind of size as you’d know at SitePoint, you’ve got pretty big lists there. But when you’re sending that many emails and purely the time that takes to actually send them is a big factor. A lot of companies come to us because they’ve been doing it themselves and then they’re finding we’re spending two days trying to get the newsletter to go out and we want to do it every week. It’s just a huge time suck, whereas we have obviously the capability to send that out within an hour or whatever.

席：是的。 但是实际上实际上只涉及大量工作，尤其是如果您要处理的站点大小清单，如SitePoint所知道的那样，那么那里会有很多清单。 但是，当您发送那么多电子邮件时，纯粹是实际发送它们所花费的时间是一个很大的因素。 许多公司之所以来找我们，是因为他们自己一直在做，然后发现我们花了两天时间试图使时事通讯出去，我们希望每周都这样做。 这只是一个巨大的时间，而我们显然有能力在一小时之内将其发送出去。

We manage everything that comes from sending that volume of emails: dealing with hard bounces and soft bounces when somebody’s out of office thing goes crazy, handling the unsubscribe requests so they you don’t accidentally send to somebody again, dealing with the spam complaints when you do accidentally send to somebody that you shouldn’t have or for some reasons somebody complains, and then all the reporting around how many of those emails did bounce, who’s getting the email, who’s not getting it, who’s opening it, what are they clicking on, what are they interested in – all that kind of information that you would like to know and that will make your email more effective if you take it into account but which is really hard to get back if you’re trying to do it all yourself.

我们管理着发送大量电子邮件所产生的一切：当有人不在办公室时发疯的情况下处理硬跳和软反弹，处理退订请求，这样您就不会再意外发送给某人，处理垃圾邮件投诉时您确实不小心将不应该发送给某人或由于某些原因而抱怨的人，然后报告所有有关这些电子邮件中有多少跳回，谁收到该电子邮件，谁没有收到，谁打开它，它们是什么的报告。单击，他们感兴趣的是–您想知道的所有此类信息，如果考虑到这些信息，则将使您的电子邮件更加有效，但是如果您尝试这样做，那么确实很难找回该电子邮件所有的你自己。

It’s basically just a massive big tangled ball of time and costs and technical requirements around email that you can kind of abstract the way and you can spend your time worrying about what content and what the design should be and not about all the technicalities of actually delivering the email.

基本上，这只是围绕电子邮件的大量时间，成本和技术要求之间的纠结，您可以抽象出方式，并且可以花时间担心内容和设计应该是什么，而不用担心实际交付的所有技术性。电子邮件。

Kevin: So as much as possible you try and make the process of designing and delivering rich email in bulk, in mass quantities, you try and limit the work that the designer has to do to the same work they have to do if they’re designing a web page. Is that fair to say?

凯文：因此，您尽可能地尝试进行大量批量设计和交付丰富电子邮件的过程，并且尝试将设计人员必须完成的工作限制为与他们必须完成的工作相同的工作。设计网页。 这公平吗？

Mat: Yeah, as far as it’s possible to basically take care of all those fiddly technical bits around actually handling the email. Any idiot can send email as we know, we always receive it from idiots. But sending an email, which is decent or which is useful is a different story and designers should really be spending their time on making the design effective and also working with their clients to make sure their clients are sending stuff which is actually useful and that people want, rather than spending all their time just worrying about whether they’ve removed people who bounced last time and whether that’s a permanent bounce or it’s a temporary bounce and whether they should send it again. There’s just a lot of information to deal with and if you can get rid of the stuff which is not your expertise and stick with the stuff which you can do better than anybody else, it’s a good way to make some money.

Mat：是的，是的，基本上可以处理实际处理电子邮件时遇到的所有技术问题。 我们知道，任何白痴都可以发送电子邮件，我们总是从白痴那里收到电子邮件。 但是发送一封体面或有用的电子邮件则是另外一回事了，设计师确实应该花时间在使设计有效上，并与客户合作，以​​确保他们的客户发送的是有用的东西，并且人们想要，而不是花所有的时间只是担心他们是否移走了上次反弹的人，这是永久性反弹还是临时性反弹，以及他们是否应该再次发送。 这里有很多信息要处理，如果您可以摆脱那些不是您的专业知识的东西，而坚持使用自己可以比别人做得更好的东西，那是赚钱的好方法。

Kevin: One of the things that we admire about Campaign Monitor at SitePoint is that you guys go a bit above and beyond your, I guess, your moneymaking operations. Compared to your competitors, you guys are out there a lot more trying to push the standards related to HTML email forward, trying to tackle some of these things that make HTML email difficult and trying to make that space a better place for designers. Can you talk about some of those efforts.

凯文：我们对SitePoint的Campaign Monitor敬佩的一件事是，你们的赚钱业务超出了我的预期。 与您的竞争对手相比，你们有更多的尝试来推动与HTML电子邮件相关的标准，试图解决一些使HTML电子邮件变得困难的问题，并试图使该空间成为设计者的更好空间。 您能谈谈其中的一些努力吗？

Mat: Sure. For a long time, for pretty much the whole time that Campaign Monitor has been around, which is a bit over five years, it came out of the company before Campaign Monitor, the same two guys who started Campaign Monitor, had a web design business themselves. So they really know the pain of having to deal with email and all the rendering problems, how your email doesn’t look the same in Outlook 2007 as it does in Outlook 2003 and also the pain of trying to deal with programs that aren’t really aimed at designers. So I guess a lot of it came out of that kind of personal understanding and the pain point that they’d tried to get around themselves. That’s kind of become part of a company culture is we shouldn’t only be building a business because there is that pain there but we should be trying to remove that pain as much as we can. Better for us, better for our customers and then in the end better for people receiving email because the easier it is for people to actually do the technical rendering parts the more time they’re going to have to spend on making the emails useful.

席：当然。 很长一段时间以来，Campaign Monitor一直存在大约五年之久，它是从公司出来的，而之前由Campaign Monitor创办的这两个人都是从事Web设计业务的他们自己。 因此，他们真的知道必须处理电子邮件以及所有呈现问题的痛苦，Outlook 2007中的电子邮件看起来与Outlook 2003中的电子邮件看起来不一样，以及尝试处理非电子邮件程序的痛苦真正针对设计师。 因此，我想很多是出于个人的理解以及他们试图摆脱困境的痛苦。 这已经成为公司文化的一部分，我们不仅应该建立业务，因为那里存在痛苦，而且我们应该尽可能地消除这种痛苦。 对我们来说更好，对我们的客户也更好，最终对接收电子邮件的人们也更好，因为人们实际进行技术渲染的过程越容易，他们就需要花费更多的时间来使电子邮件变得有用。

A couple of things we’re doing: early on, we did a lot of the research about what particular CSS you supported in which particular email clients, which has been a really popular report over the years just to find out that okay, this Outlook 2007 for example, it doesn’t support background images. So instead of spending (like we did) forever trying to work out why is it not showing up, you can just go here and look and say look, it’s just not supported.

我们正在做的两件事：早期，我们对您在哪些特定电子邮件客户端中所支持的特定CSS进行了很多研究，这是多年来非常受欢迎的报告 ，目的是为了找出这种情况，以2007为例，它不支持背景图片。 因此，与其花费(像我们一样)永远花时间弄清楚为什么它没有显示出来，不如直接去看一下并说出外观，它就是不受支持的。

Kevin: There’s about five different ways you can try and make that work and then you get to the end of your afternoon and realize, oh, none of them work.

凯文：您可以尝试大约五种不同的方法来完成这项工作，然后到下午结束时才意识到，哦，它们都不起作用。

Mat: None of them work or even more annoying, one of them works but only in certain cases, which are not really clear at all, and it just seemed random. And why does the email strip out all my styles. If you don’t know that that’s what happening, a lot of this stuff is very time consuming. So we’ve got a lot of research in those areas – which email clients block images by default, does a form work if I send it in an email… all those kinds of things where it just takes a long time to test them. So we’ve gone out and done that and just stick that all in reports. So you can find it and save yourselves a lot of time.

Mat：它们中的任何一个都不起作用，甚至更令人讨厌，其中之一起作用，但仅在某些情况下才真正起作用，这些情况一点也不十分清楚，而且看起来只是随机的。 以及为什么电子邮件会剔除我所有的样式。 如果您不知道发生了什么，那么其中很多东西都是非常耗时的。 因此，我们在这些领域进行了大量研究-电子邮件客户端默认情况下会屏蔽图像，如果我通过电子邮件发送图像，则该表格会起作用……所有这些事情都需要很长时间对其进行测试。 因此，我们已完成并完成了所有工作，并将其全部保留在报告中。 因此，您可以找到它并节省大量时间。

Kevin: So as a designer who’s tackling an HTML email job and you want to make it as rich and beautiful as possible, is step 1 reading those reports? Do you have to read those reports?

凯文：作为一名处理HTML电子邮件工作的设计师，您想使其变得尽可能丰富和美观，步骤1是否正在阅读这些报告？ 您需要阅读那些报告吗？

Mat: If you just want to send a basic email where you’re not doing anything fancy and I guess if you’ve been designing emails—or designing web pages I should say—since, let’s say, 1999, if you were designing them in, you could pretty much take your 1999 design skills and keep creating emails with those, then it would be fine.

Mat：如果您只是想发送基本电子邮件，而您却没有做任何花哨的事情，并且我想您是否一直在设计电子邮件(或者应该说设计网页)，例如从1999年开始，如果您正在设计它们在这种情况下，您几乎可以充分利用1999年的设计技能，并继续使用这些技能来创建电子邮件，那就很好了。

Kevin: As long as you don’t need background images.

凯文：只要你不需要背景图片。

Mat: Yeah, that’s right. If you’ve done anything in the 2000’s, you’re probably going to have to relearn a little bit how to do things old school to make it work. But yeah, you will quickly run into limitations and fiddly things where you’re not sure, is it meant to be working, am I doing something wrong, is there something wrong with my code, and you just save yourself an enormous amount of time, do that or you can go and grab one of the free templates we give out where we’ve done all that testing.

Mat：是的，没错。 如果您在2000年代做过任何事情，您可能将不得不重新学习一点旧方法，以使其正常工作。 但是，是的，您很快就会遇到局限性和不确定的不确定性，这是否意味着它可以正常工作，我做错了什么，我的代码是否出了错，您只是节省了很多时间，执行此操作，或者您可以获取我们提供的所有测试模板中的免费模板之一。

It’s definitely worth knowing what those reports are so that when something does go wrong, you can at least find out if it’s your fault or Microsoft’s.

绝对值得知道这些报告是什么，以便在出现问题时至少可以找出是您的错还是微软的错。

Kevin: Speaking of Microsoft, one of the big campaigns you guys undertook was the fixoutlook.org campaign. Why don’t you talk us through that because I had so much fun watching you guys do that as it went but I’m really curious what was going on behind the scenes because at the end of the day, what you were trying to do was very gently twist Microsoft’s arm. And having interviewed people at Microsoft over the years and having spoken to people at Microsoft, and just as every web designer’s had to do over the years having to deal with the decisions Microsoft makes, you kind of get the sense that the harder you twist their arm the less they’re going to actually be willing to work with you.

凯文：就微软而言，你们进行的大型活动之一是fixoutlook.org活动。 您为什么不跟我们说这件事，因为我很开心地看着你们这样做，但是我真的很好奇幕后发生的事情，因为归根结底，您想做什么轻轻地扭动了微软的手臂。 多年来，与Microsoft的工作人员进行了面谈，并与Microsoft的工作人员进行了交谈，就像多年来每位Web设计师必须处理Microsoft做出的决定一样，您会感觉到您越难以扭转他们的想法。减少他们实际愿意与您合作的机会。

Mat: Yes. That’s always the risk when you’re trying to make some change. I guess it came out of the Email Standards Project is the banner which that whole campaign took place under and we started that up separate to Campaign Monitor with the idea that we could get support possibly from other email service providers and people like that, people involved in the industry and then not just be a Campaign Monitor thing, which is still the idea. But what we found basically is that everybody was complaining about the situation, like why is it so hard to design for email, why make it possible but then make it incredibly frustrating by having wildly variable support across all the different email clients.

席：是的。 当您尝试进行一些更改时，这始终是风险。 我想它来自整个电子邮件活动的标语，它是整个活动开展的旗帜，我们开始与Campaign Monitor分开，其构想是我们可以从其他电子邮件服务提供商和类似的人那里获得支持。在行业中，然后不仅是Campaign Monitor，这仍然是个主意。 但是我们发现，基本上，每个人都在抱怨这种情况，例如为什么设计电子邮件如此困难，为什么要实现它，但是却通过在所有不同的电子邮件客户端上获得广泛的支持而使它令人沮丧。

Kevin: And why actively make it more difficult over time.

凯文：为什么随着时间的推移积极地使其变得更加困难。

Mat: Yeah. Why take a step back from Outlook 2003 in the case of Outlook to Outlook 2007 where the rendering got a lot worse because they swapped from using Internet Explorer to render emails, which obviously has its own problems but at least it is a known quantity, and then to use Microsoft Word’s rendering engine, which is just bizarre. So everybody was upset about it but nobody’s really doing anything and we kind of got to the point where we say well, if anybody should be doing it, it should be us because we’re the ones who are in this industry, we’re providing a service, we’re making money from basically helping people deal with it and it kind of seemed like the right thing for us to do is to try and improve things on behalf of all of our customers and all the people who aren’t our customers but who are in the same situation. So we actually started first with Gmail. I don’t know if you remember the Gmail Grimaces Project.

垫子：是的。 在Outlook的情况下，为什么要从Outlook 2003退回到Outlook 2007，在Outlook 2007上，渲染变得更糟，因为它们从使用Internet Explorer来渲染电子邮件(这显然有其自身的问题，但至少是已知数量)交换了下来，并且然后使用Microsoft Word的渲染引擎，这很奇怪。 所以每个人都对此感到不高兴，但是没人真正在做任何事情，我们有点说得好，如果有人应该做，那应该是我们，因为我们是这个行业的人，我们提供服务，我们是从基本上帮助人们处理服务中获利的，这似乎是我们要做的正确的事情，就是代表所有客户和所有不愿意尝试的人尝试并改进它我们的客户，但情况相同。 因此，我们实际上首先开始使用Gmail。 我不知道您是否还记得Gmail Grimaces项目 。

Kevin: No, I don’t.

凯文：不，我不知道。

Mat: Which was a simpler one but Gmail has a few issues mostly to do with it will work fine if you use inline styles but if you don’t use inline styles, it just strips them all out and your email looks terrible, which it just seems very odd because technically, there’s no reason they couldn’t like most other email clients just take those styles, render them safe in whatever way they need to and then apply them.

Mat：这比较简单，但是Gmail有一些主要问题，如果您使用内嵌样式，Gmail可以正常工作，但是如果您不使用内嵌样式，它会将所有内容都清除掉，您的电子邮件看起来也很糟糕，似乎很奇怪，因为从技术上讲，没有理由他们不会不喜欢大多数其他电子邮件客户端只是采用这些样式，以所需的任何方式使其安全，然后再应用它们。

Kevin: Yeah, it seems a pretty shortsighted… like someone in the Gmail team on day 1 went what are some simplifying assumptions, some shortcuts we could take to make our job easier and they didn’t actually think through whether the shortcut would make their job easier, they thought well that’s something we might try and so they did it and they’ve never really looked back.

凯文：是的，这似乎是短视的……就像第一天的Gmail团队中的某人做了一些简化的假设，我们可以采取一些捷径来简化我们的工作，他们实际上并没有考虑过捷径是否会使他们工作变得更轻松，他们认为这是我们可以尝试的方法，所以他们做到了，他们从未真正回过头。

Mat: Yeah. I mean you can never know what was going on inside the head of someone at the time but a lot of these decisions I think are because the people involved don’t believe in the whole concept of HTML email, so they’re not really too fussed about making it work.

垫子：是的。 我的意思是您永远无法知道当时某人的脑袋里正在发生什么，但是我认为这些决定中有很多是因为相关人员不相信HTML电子邮件的整个概念，因此他们并不是真的忙于使它工作。

Kevin: Yeah, from what we hear about email culture inside of Google, it’s a lot of big mailing lists, which you assume are very texty; not very design centric.

凯文：是的，从我们听到的有关Google内部电子邮件文化的信息来看，有很多大型邮件列表，您认为这些列表很冗长； 不太以设计为中心。

Mat: Yes, exactly. So they design what they need, which is always the case; people design where they think products should go and there’s obviously some assumptions built into Gmail. We basically had no luck with getting in contact with anybody at Gmail even to ask them why they did it in that way because maybe there was some reason that we didn’t know about and we would have liked to have that conversation but we hadn’t had any success. And so the Gmail Grimaces Project was basically we got a bunch of web designers all over the world to take a photo of themselves making the face that they make when they see what their email looks like in Gmail, and there were some very interesting photos that came back.

Mat：是的，完全正确。 因此，他们会设计所需的东西，这总是如此。 人们设计他们认为应该去哪里的产品，并且Gmail中显然内置了一些假设。 我们基本上没有与Gmail的任何人联系的运气，甚至问他们为什么要那样做，因为也许由于某些原因我们不知道，我们希望进行对话，但我们没有没有成功。 因此，Gmail Grimaces Project基本上是我们在世界各地的一群Web设计师拍摄的一张自己的照片，当他们看到自己的电子邮件在Gmail中的样子时，就做出了自己的脸，还有一些非常有趣的照片回来。

Kevin: Is that still up somewhere?

凯文：那还在某个地方吗？

Mat: Yeah, if you go to email-standards.org and you search on there for grimaces, Gmail grimaces, you’ll find that. So we took all those photos kind of made them into a little 30-second video with the dramatic voiceover basically appealing to Gmail to do something about it and stop these people from their suffering.

Mat：是的，如果您访问email-standards.org并在该站点上搜索鬼脸，Gmail鬼脸，您会发现的。 因此，我们将所有这些照片拍摄成一段短短30秒的视频 ，其戏剧性的配音基本上吸引了Gmail采取一些措施并阻止了这些人的痛苦。

That got some attention and we did eventually hear from a couple of engineers at Gmail and some former engineers who said at least that they would be willing to spend some of their 20% time investigating and finding out what was going on. We still haven’t really seen anything change at Gmail but we do at least have the names of some people we can talk to and it’s a step forward.

这引起了一些注意，我们最终确实听到了Gmail的一些工程师和一些前工程师的话，他们说至少他们愿意花20％的时间来调查并了解发生了什么。 我们仍然没有真正看到Gmail发生任何变化，但是至少我们有可以与之交谈的人的名字，这是向前迈出的一步。

The next thing we moved onto was Outlook, which was the one you’re referring to, the fixoutlook.org project and the idea with that one, pretty much the same thing, was we had actually spoken to a few people at Microsoft, nobody in the Outlook team, but I’d spoken to Chris Wilson, the IE team lead at the time, about why they’ve done that and basically the position that I had or that we understood from Microsoft was we get a lot of pressure about security and from the Microsoft Office team in general about creating emails with Word and that they should look good whereas we’re not getting any pressure at all about HTML email rendering, which is completely understandable because I can imagine most designers basically were just ignoring the idea at that point. So we felt maybe we can create that pressure, we can at least equalize things a bit and get some attention and we tried to make it as easy as possible because we’re constantly hearing from people who are upset about it but they don’t really know what to do about it, other than complain and obviously that wasn’t going to be that effective if everyone is just individually complaining to us or to their service provider.

接下来要介绍的是Outlook，它是您所指的项目，即fixoutlook.org项目，与之几乎相同的想法是，我们实际上是与Microsoft的几个人交谈的，没有人在Outlook团队中，但我曾与IE团队的负责人Chris Wilson谈过，他们为什么要这么做，基本上我所担任的职位或我们从Microsoft那里了解到的职位给我们带来了很大的压力安全性以及Microsoft Office团队提供的有关使用Word创建电子邮件的一般外观，它们看起来应该不错，而我们对HTML电子邮件呈现完全没有压力，这是完全可以理解的，因为我可以想象大多数设计师基本上只是忽略了在那个时候的想法。 因此，我们觉得也许我们可以创造这种压力，至少可以使事情平分秋色并引起注意，我们试图使之尽可能容易，因为我们一直在不断听到对此感到沮丧的人的声音，但他们没有除了抱怨之外，我真的知道该怎么做，很明显，如果每个人都只是单独地向我们或他们的服务提供商抱怨，那将不会那么有效。

So we created that website, fixoutlook.org and basically made it super easy for people to say look, I support this project, which has just evolved tweeting with the particular hash tag in it and then our Fix Outlook site would basically go out and grab all those tweets and get the avatar for the person who tweeted, kind of merge them into a really nice wall of faces showing what people were saying about that and it really just took off from that. Like on the first day there was, maybe first couple of days, 6,000 people retweeted it and then it’s up to 27,000 times now.

因此，我们创建了该网站fixoutlook.org ，基本上让人们说起来超级容易。我支持这个项目，该项目刚刚在推特中添加了特定的哈希标签，然后我们的Fix Outlook网站就可以使用了所有这些推文，并为发推文的人提供化身，就像将它们合并到一副非常漂亮的面Kong中，显示人们在说什么，而这实际上从那开始。 就像在第一天，也许是前几天，有6,000人转发了它，然后现在达到了27,000次。

Kevin: It was astonishing, when you got to the page… I don’t know, going into it I sort of… I would see the mention of the campaign and I go wow, there’s actually someone else out there who cares about this issue as much as I do. I better go sign their petition so that they don’t only have 10 people on their petition and then you go to the page and you’re bombarded by this moving wall of faces and you realize this really is a massive issue that affects a lot of people.

凯文：当您到达页面时，这真是令人惊讶。。。我不知道，进入页面的感觉有点……我会看到竞选活动的消息，我哇，实际上还有其他人在乎这个问题。和我一样 我最好去签署他们的请愿书，以使他们的请愿书上不只有10个人，然后您转到页面，您被这动不动的面Kong轰炸了，您意识到这确实是一个影响很多人的巨大问题人。

Mat: Yeah, that’s it; it was trying to provide some visibility to the number of people that are really struggling with it.

Mat：是的，就是这样； 它试图提供一些真正挣扎于此的人数的可见性。

Kevin: Microsoft likes to talk about their responsibility to not break the Web and they site like half a billion users for Internet Explorer and that wall of faces to me represented the fact that they had broken email.

凯文(Kevin)：微软喜欢谈论他们不破坏网络的责任，他们像Internet Explorer的十亿用户一样访问网站，而我的面Kong代表了他们破坏了电子邮件的事实。

Mat: Yes, and in a way that just wasn’t necessary because they were in a situation where… I mean much the same as they were in browser land where other people are showing it can be done, like Apple Mail basically just uses WebKit to render email and it doesn’t cause them any problems. I mean I can say that they might want to restrict some types of things and we have no problem with saying okay, JavaScript is not going to work in your email, fine. But as to why we have to – you know we can’t use floats and we can’t use background images and why the margins and padding should be completely wacky and then not consistent, all that kind of stuff.

Mat：是的，在某种程度上是不必要的，因为它们处于……我的意思是和在其他人正在展示可以完成的浏览器领域中一样，例如Apple Mail基本上只使用WebKit。呈现电子邮件，不会造成任何问题。 我的意思是我可以说他们可能想限制某些类型的事情，并且我们可以说JavaScript不会在您的电子邮件中正常工作没问题。 但是关于为什么我们必须-您知道我们不能使用浮点数，也不能使用背景图像，以及为什么所有这些东西的边距和填充都应该完全古怪，然后又不一致。

So this was just an easy way for people to say I have this pain too and I want something done about it. And we’ve always tried to approach it in a very positive way, really following on from the Web Standards Project, which is to say we’re not here to attack you. We just want to basically start a conversation about how we can improve the next version of Outlook. And we got a lot of press from that. TechCrunch and Mashable and CNet and ZDNet and some print media, all followed up on that because it just took off so quickly. And then we did hear from Microsoft at least on the Outlook blog. Unfortunately, we heard them saying basically they weren’t going to do anything about it. That was the first time they had even acknowledged that there was an issue. We did talk to some people inside Microsoft and we managed to talk to the product manager for Outlook and at least get their position, we understand their position a bit better about why they’re doing what they’re doing.

因此，这只是人们说我也有这种痛苦的一种简便方法，我希望对此有所作为。 而且，我们一直试图以一种非常积极的方式来实现它，实际上是从Web Standards Project开始的 ，这就是说我们并不是要攻击您。 我们只想开始就如何改进下一个版本的Outlook进行对话。 因此，我们得到了很多媒体的关注。 TechCrunch和Mashable以及CNet和ZDNet以及一些印刷媒体都跟进了这一过程，因为它发展得如此之快。 然后我们确实至少在Outlook博客上收到了Microsoft的来信。 不幸的是，我们听到他们说基本上他们不会对此做任何事情。 那是他们甚至第一次承认存在问题。 我们确实与Microsoft内部的一些人进行了交谈，并且设法与Outlook的产品经理进行了交谈，至少可以得到他们的位置，我们对他们为什么要做自己的工作的理解更好一些。

Kevin: So what was their position? Was it “Yes, we realized we made a tough compromise but we’re happy with the compromise we’ve made?”

凯文：那他们的立场是什么？ 是“是的，我们意识到我们做出了艰难的妥协，但对所做的妥协感到满意吗？”

Mat: Yeah. Essentially, it was to say we had competing pressures here. It was one to standardize and to do better rendering and the other one is for people who are creating emails using Microsoft Office to make sure that the email looks the same on the other end as it does when they send it. To us, it seems kind of shortsighted of you saying we’re going to make the experience good for the percentage of people who are using Word via Outlook to send email and using that to read it as well as opposed to everybody else in the world who’s having to put up with it. Microsoft Office is, obviously, their massive money spinning product and I can say that internally, they probably have a huge amount of power in that area.

垫子：是的。 本质上，这就是说我们在这里面临竞争压力。 这是为了标准化并提供更好的呈现效果，而另一种方法是供使用Microsoft Office创建电子邮件的人员使用，以确保电子邮件的另一端与发送电子邮件时的外观相同。 对我们而言，您似乎有点短视，表示我们将使这种体验对那些通过Outlook使用Word发送电子邮件并使用它来阅读电子邮件的人(相对于世界上其他所有人)有所帮助谁不得不忍受它。 显然，Microsoft Office是他们大量赚钱的纺纱产品，我可以说在内部，他们在该领域可能拥有巨大的力量。

We printed out a poster, a really huge poster of all those Twitter avatars and we sent it off to Microsoft and they put it up in their hallway, in the Outlook office. They sent us photos of that. So I think we did have some impact and at least they’re aware of it.

我们打印了一张海报，这是所有这些Twitter头像的非常大的海报，然后将其发送给Microsoft，然后他们将它们放在Outlook办公室的走廊上。 他们给我们发送了照片。 因此，我认为我们确实产生了一些影响，至少他们意识到了这一点。

Kevin: So how does that work? Have you got like people on the inside at Microsoft who are sympathetic to the cause? Like someone made the decision to put that up on the wall and it wasn’t someone who thought that you didn’t have a point.

凯文：那怎么办？ 您是否像Microsoft内部的人一样对这一事业感到同情？ 就像有人决定把它放在墙上，并不是有人认为你没有道理。

Mat: No, and I think they’re well aware that it could be better. And again, without being inside there you don’t know exactly why they could be on one hand quite sympathetic and willing to talk and on the other hand, not actually make any change and I guess you could be cynical about it inside that it’s a PR thing to just say “we’re listening” and then do nothing.

Mat：不，我想他们很清楚这会更好。 再说一次，如果不在那儿，你不知道为什么他们一方面会很同情和乐于谈论，另一方面却并没有做出任何改变，我想你可能会对此持怀疑态度。公关的事情只是说“我们在听”，然后什么也不做。

On the other hand, if you choose to see it in a positive way it’s just that there are some dissenting opinions and at this point, whoever it is that’s deciding to use Word, that’s the position that they’ve stuck with and they still standing there but we’re in a better position and closer then we where before to making it change. Unfortunately, Outlook 2010, we’ve tested that one already and it doesn’t make any difference in terms of rendering. It’s pretty much the same as Outlook 2007.

另一方面，如果您选择以积极的方式看待它，则只是有一些不同意见，并且在这一点上，无论是决定使用Word的是谁，这都是他们坚持并仍然坚持的立场在那里，但我们处于一个更好的位置，并且距离我们要改变它的位置更近。 不幸的是，在Outlook 2010中，我们已经对其进行了测试，并且在呈现方面没有任何区别。 它与Outlook 2007几乎相同。

Kevin: So they haven’t even improved the Word rendering engine?

凯文：所以他们甚至还没有改进Word呈现引擎？

Mat: Not as far as we can tell. It’s pretty much got the same issues that we already saw, which is quite sad but the fight goes on. We at least now are in contact with people and we can, hopefully, keep working on that.

Mat：据我们所知。 它几乎遇到了我们已经看到的相同问题，这很可悲，但斗争仍在继续。 至少现在我们与人们保持联系，我们可以继续努力。

Kevin: You mentioned that you went through all the trouble of documenting what works where in these various reports and what it comes down to is you’re using late-1990’s-era web dev techniques, what does that really boil down to specifically?

凯文(Kevin)：您提到过麻烦的是，要在各种报告中记录下什么有效，而结果归结为您使用的是1990年代后期的Web开发技术，这到底可以归结为什么？

Mat: Well, I guess the main thing is that you have to go back and get your old tables out again because very few of the major browsers will, at least the desktop browsers, the ones with the huge market share, the ones which don’t support things like floats and that kind of div based layouts, so you’re back to using tables to make sure that the structure stays together for everybody. And then you just have to accept that you’re going to get a lot more variation in terms of your design than you would on a modern web browser and things like images don’t show up by default for a lot of people. So if you send it, it’s got a nice big header at the top and they’re viewing that in a preview pane, say, and that image doesn’t load, which it probably won’t if you’re sending to Gmail or Outlook or Yahoo!, by default, they’re not going to see the image. You know at best case, they’re going to see the alt attribute and in a lot of cases they won’t even see that.

Mat：嗯，我想最主要的是您必须回去重新使用旧表，因为很少有主流浏览器，至少是台式机浏览器，拥有巨大市场份额的浏览器，以及不支持浮点数和基于div的布局之类的内容，因此您要返回使用表来确保每个人的结构都保持一致的方式。 然后，您只需要接受与现代Web浏览器相比，您将在设计上获得更多的变化，并且默认情况下，对于很多人来说，诸如图像之类的东西不会显示出来。 因此，如果您发送它，它的顶部会有一个很大的标题，并且他们正在预览窗格中查看该标题，例如，该图片未加载，如果您发送到Gmail或默认情况下，Outlook或Yahoo!不会显示图像。 您知道最好的情况是，他们将看到alt属性，在许多情况下，他们甚至都不会看到。

It’s almost like, especially with the preview pane, I like to imagine it’s Ned Kelly, if he was trying to browse in your shop through that little window in his helmet just seeing a tiny bit of it and having to judge based on that whether he’s going to actually purchase something.

就像是预览窗格，这几乎就像是我想像的是Ned Kelly，如果他正试图通过头盔上的那个小窗口在您的商店中浏览，只是看到其中的一小部分，并且必须根据它来判断实际购买东西。

If you’re not an Australian you’ll have to go look up who Ned Kelly is.

如果您不是澳大利亚人，则必须去找Ned Kelly是谁。

Kevin: How do you know as a designer, do you have to keep… just as you do for browser testing, do you have to make sure you have the ability to run all the major email platforms in order to see what you’re doing?

凯文：您是如何知道设计师的，是否必须保留……就像进行浏览器测试一样，是否必须确保能够运行所有主要的电子邮件平台才能查看自己在做什么？ ？

Mat: Well, certainly that’s an option. It’s so much harder for email than it is for the Web because you can run five, six, seven web browsers on your one computer especially if you’re using a PC or you have access to a Windows environment and you’ve pretty much covered all the major ones, and if anything that’s going to be of any decent size audience.

Mat：嗯，当然这是一个选择。 与电子邮件相比，电子邮件要困难得多，因为您可以在一台计算机上运行五，六，七种网络浏览器，尤其是在使用PC或可以访问Windows环境且已经涵盖了很多内容的情况下所有主要对象，以及任何规模的听众。

Kevin: And you make a change and you just hit refresh, refresh, refresh.

凯文：然后进行更改，您只需刷新，刷新，刷新即可。

Mat: Yeah and you see it all there. It’s all instant. Whereas, obviously, for email you’ve got either 12 or 15 email clients, which have pretty significant share of the market and a lot of them, you know that obviously, the web based ones are reasonably easy to test because they’re mostly free and you can have an account and that’s fine. You still have to send the email and then wait for it to be delivered and hope that it didn’t go into your spam folder so you can find it. But then the desktop ones like installing a server based version of Lotus Notes is not really practical for most people. And unless you already have access to it that can be a bit of a nightmare.

Mat：是的，你在那里看到了一切。 都是瞬间。 显然，对于电子邮件，您拥有12或15个电子邮件客户端，这些客户端在市场中占有相当大的份额，而且其中很多，您知道，基于Web的客户端显然很容易测试，因为它们大多免费，您可以拥有一个帐户，这很好。 您仍然必须发送电子邮件，然后等待其发送，并希望它不会进入您的垃圾邮件文件夹，以便您可以找到它。 但是，对于大多数人来说，台式机(例如安装基于服务器的Lotus Notes版本)并不实际。 除非您已经可以使用它，否则可能会有些噩梦。

That’s one of the reasons that Campaign Monitor and a lot of other services include a testing service where you send your email once or it automatically gets sent and it returns screenshots, browser cam style screenshots of how the email renders in different clients, which is a big time saver. It’s not as good obviously as seeing it in the actual email client but you can at least get a lot closer and when you see one of those reports you realize how many different email clients there are out there.

这就是Campaign Monitor和许多其他服务包括测试服务的原因之一，您可以一次发送电子邮件，或者自动发送电子邮件，然后返回屏幕截图，浏览器cam风格的屏幕截图，说明电子邮件在不同客户端中的呈现方式。节省大量时间。 这显然不如在实际的电子邮件客户端中看到的那样好，但是您至少可以更加接近，当您看到这些报告之一时，您就会意识到那里有多少个不同的电子邮件客户端。

Kevin: Yeah, definitely, we use that preview very heavily when testing our email newsletters and it’s remarkable. You know just in a particular newsletter we might have a piece of sample code that we’re showing that’s a little wider than the template would usually allow for that part of the newsletter to be but as we’re developing that issue looking at the preview as we’re just building the newsletter as a web page, we kind of go oh well, that forces the template to stretch a little bit and it actually doesn’t look too bad but you go ahead and preview it and you realize that that small pressure blows apart the layout in one or two of the email clients that are important to you.

凯文：是的，当然，在测试电子邮件时事通讯时，我们会大量使用该预览，这非常了不起。 您知道，仅在特定的新闻通讯中，我们可能会显示一段示例代码，该示例代码比模板通常允许新闻稿的那部分宽一些，但是在我们通过预览预览解决此问题时因为我们只是将新闻稿构建为网页，所以我们要走了，好吧，这迫使模板拉伸了一点，实际上看起来还不错，但是您继续进行预览，您意识到很小的压力就会破坏一两个对您很重要的电子邮件客户端的布局。

Mat: Yeah and some of them can be quite fragile in that way. And then if you don’t have direct access to test, the whole process becomes very time consuming because you – especially if you’re having to send through another service, get back a screenshot, try and work out with the screenshot, not really even with an active render, at least with a website, with a web browser you can you know fiddle Firebug, use it to change things and test it kind of instantly. But in an email you’re kind of waiting for that screenshot to come back and then try to work out what should I change, what is most likely to fix it then I can run another test. It is a more time consuming environment.

Mat：是的，其中一些可能会非常脆弱。 And then if you don't have direct access to test, the whole process becomes very time consuming because you – especially if you're having to send through another service, get back a screenshot, try and work out with the screenshot, not really even with an active render, at least with a website, with a web browser you can you know fiddle Firebug, use it to change things and test it kind of instantly. But in an email you're kind of waiting for that screenshot to come back and then try to work out what should I change, what is most likely to fix it then I can run another test. It is a more time consuming environment.

That’s kind of one of the reasons that Campaign Monitor includes a template system so that you can spend all that time upfront, get your template working and then kind of lock it down and just create some editable areas where you, your clients or whoever can log in add content and send those emails without the risk of destroying the whole thing.

That's kind of one of the reasons that Campaign Monitor includes a template system so that you can spend all that time upfront, get your template working and then kind of lock it down and just create some editable areas where you, your clients or whoever can log in add content and send those emails without the risk of destroying the whole thing.

Kevin: Yeah and we learned that lesson the hard way at SitePoint. The last designs we had for our HTML email newsletters where coded from scratch by us who thought we know what we’re doing, we can figure this out and it was really hard and even when we were done, it wasn’t completely figured out. And so when it came time to redesign them and we had already moved to Campaign Monitor services, we swallowed our pride and grabbed one of the simplest looking templates that we could find from Campaign Monitor and used it as a foundation and it really did— Just using that as the foundation points you in the right direction and steers you away from a lot of the things that are going to get you into trouble and waste a lot of your time.

Kevin: Yeah and we learned that lesson the hard way at SitePoint. The last designs we had for our HTML email newsletters where coded from scratch by us who thought we know what we're doing, we can figure this out and it was really hard and even when we were done, it wasn't completely figured out. And so when it came time to redesign them and we had already moved to Campaign Monitor services, we swallowed our pride and grabbed one of the simplest looking templates that we could find from Campaign Monitor and used it as a foundation and it really did— Just using that as the foundation points you in the right direction and steers you away from a lot of the things that are going to get you into trouble and waste a lot of your time.

Mat: Absolutely. Yeah, because we’ve just spent endless hours fiddling with those, trying to get them all working and testing and trying to work out why they don’t work and that’s a big part of why Campaign Monitor is different, I guess, to a lot of other services is that web designers by background and so we care about that kind of stuff. Whereas a lot of the other services are from marketing companies that come out of print marketing companies and they’ve added email where they will say here you go, you can send, you can use these two templates and just going to put your logo here and it’s just horrible for designers to use who are used to having control and who have the skills to actually do something better.

Mat: Absolutely. Yeah, because we've just spent endless hours fiddling with those, trying to get them all working and testing and trying to work out why they don't work and that's a big part of why Campaign Monitor is different, I guess, to a lot of other services is that web designers by background and so we care about that kind of stuff. Whereas a lot of the other services are from marketing companies that come out of print marketing companies and they've added email where they will say here you go, you can send, you can use these two templates and just going to put your logo here and it's just horrible for designers to use who are used to having control and who have the skills to actually do something better.

Kevin: So at SitePoint we use Campaign Monitor’s services directly to send newsletters that we want to send and as a result, I don’t have a clear picture of how your services fit into someone who’s working maybe as a freelance web designer or working in a web design company that’s working for clients. So spell that out for me. How does that work?

Kevin: So at SitePoint we use Campaign Monitor's services directly to send newsletters that we want to send and as a result, I don't have a clear picture of how your services fit into someone who's working maybe as a freelance web designer or working in a web design company that's working for clients. So spell that out for me. 这是如何运作的？

Mat: There is a second side to Campaign Monitor. There’s the one you’re just saying where you’re a designer or you send emails for yourself.

Mat: There is a second side to Campaign Monitor. There's the one you're just saying where you're a designer or you send emails for yourself.

Kevin: Right.

凯文：对。

Mat: That’s fine or even you can send on behalf of your client that you’re doing all of the design and just sending it out but there’s also a kind of white label aspect to Campaign Monitor, which is aimed at designers, freelancers or agencies, which is you can offer an email marketing service to your clients as an additional service that you give to them. Basically that involves you set up your marketing site or you put it on your normal website saying that we now offer email marketing services and then you link into a custom, a re-branded version of Campaign Monitor and this is completely white labeled. So there’s no mention of Campaign Monitor there, it doesn’t say anything about who’s providing the service; it just presents as your own product.

Mat: That's fine or even you can send on behalf of your client that you're doing all of the design and just sending it out but there's also a kind of white label aspect to Campaign Monitor, which is aimed at designers, freelancers or agencies, which is you can offer an email marketing service to your clients as an additional service that you give to them. Basically that involves you set up your marketing site or you put it on your normal website saying that we now offer email marketing services and then you link into a custom, a re-branded version of Campaign Monitor and this is completely white labeled. So there's no mention of Campaign Monitor there, it doesn't say anything about who's providing the service; it just presents as your own product.

Kevin: And your clients log into that?

Kevin: And your clients log into that?

Mat: Yeah and they can log in through your own website and be directed into your re-branded Campaign Monitor account without ever knowing that they’ve kind of left your environment. You can use a custom domain to make that more re-branded. And then the idea is that you can then create for them templates based on their own unique brand and use one of our free templates as a base or create your own custom from scratch, whatever you like, set that up for them and then they can login, manage their subscribers and create lists and add lists and then create new campaigns based on those templates using an onscreen editor where they don’t need to have any HTML skills at all, they can just concentrate on the content, the stuff that they actually know about, upload images…

Mat: Yeah and they can log in through your own website and be directed into your re-branded Campaign Monitor account without ever knowing that they've kind of left your environment. You can use a custom domain to make that more re-branded. And then the idea is that you can then create for them templates based on their own unique brand and use one of our free templates as a base or create your own custom from scratch, whatever you like, set that up for them and then they can login, manage their subscribers and create lists and add lists and then create new campaigns based on those templates using an onscreen editor where they don't need to have any HTML skills at all, they can just concentrate on the content, the stuff that they actually know about, upload images…

Kevin: Alright. So that’s the missing element that we don’t see at SitePoint because we do still author our newsletters by hand ourselves.

凯文：好吧。 So that's the missing element that we don't see at SitePoint because we do still author our newsletters by hand ourselves.

Mat: Yeah, which is great for designers because you can vary things every month, if you want to do something a little bit different you can just do that but if you’re not interested in doing that so a lot of designers kind of do a mix of both. They will sometimes send individual campaigns, which they’ve designed specifically for that particular occurrence and the rest of the time they’ll use a template where they just plugin new content each month or each week.

Mat: Yeah, which is great for designers because you can vary things every month, if you want to do something a little bit different you can just do that but if you're not interested in doing that so a lot of designers kind of do a mix of both. They will sometimes send individual campaigns, which they've designed specifically for that particular occurrence and the rest of the time they'll use a template where they just plugin new content each month or each week.

One of the big benefits to designers of the re-branding system is that you can then set the prices that your clients will pay. So they login, they send their campaign, they pay us—although they don’t know they’re paying us, they think they’re paying you—they pay us whatever amount you decide, you have set in their account, we take out the base price that we charge everybody and the rest we just save up and then once a month will send that back to you as cash. So I had a look this morning and I think we’ve given back in total to designers about $2 million worth.

One of the big benefits to designers of the re-branding system is that you can then set the prices that your clients will pay. So they login, they send their campaign, they pay us—although they don't know they're paying us, they think they're paying you—they pay us whatever amount you decide, you have set in their account, we take out the base price that we charge everybody and the rest we just save up and then once a month will send that back to you as cash. So I had a look this morning and I think we've given back in total to designers about $2 million worth.

Kevin: Geez.

Kevin: Geez.

Mat: Yeah. So there’s a lot of people making some good money basically from email and then of course the beauty of it is once you’ve set them up and you set their templates up, every time they send from then on, you can earn a little bit extra. So it’s kind of an ongoing income stream, which is a nice thing especially in a web design agency where so much work is kind of project base.

Mat: Yeah. So there's a lot of people making some good money basically from email and then of course the beauty of it is once you've set them up and you set their templates up, every time they send from then on, you can earn a little bit extra. So it's kind of an ongoing income stream, which is a nice thing especially in a web design agency where so much work is kind of project base.

Kevin: And it’s not just an ongoing income stream from nothing; it takes what would be an ongoing nuisance of your clients sending you a Word document saying “please send this out to our 10,000 customers by this afternoon as a beautifully designed email.” It takes that work away and makes you that revenue stream.

Kevin: And it's not just an ongoing income stream from nothing; it takes what would be an ongoing nuisance of your clients sending you a Word document saying “please send this out to our 10,000 customers by this afternoon as a beautifully designed email.” It takes that work away and makes you that revenue stream.

Mat: Yeah. So we get a lot of feedback from designers—

Mat: Yeah. So we get a lot of feedback from designers—

Kevin: Do you get many designers who don’t charge their clients a markup at all just because it’s that convenience?

Kevin: Do you get many designers who don't charge their clients a markup at all just because it's that convenience?

Mat: Yeah, definitely. There is a lot of people who they still do the re-branding side but they just basically they will pay us and they’ll then price into whatever they’re charging the client for. They’ll throw it in as an extra to the website design, and then there’s people who go the other way, who charge multiples of what we charge and make some good money. There are some people making $4,000-$5,000 a month every month and effectively for providing an ongoing service where they’ve done most of the work already and now they’re just doing a little bit of maintenance. So it can be very effective.

Mat: Yeah, definitely. There is a lot of people who they still do the re-branding side but they just basically they will pay us and they'll then price into whatever they're charging the client for. They'll throw it in as an extra to the website design, and then there's people who go the other way, who charge multiples of what we charge and make some good money. There are some people making $4,000-$5,000 a month every month and effectively for providing an ongoing service where they've done most of the work already and now they're just doing a little bit of maintenance. So it can be very effective.

Kevin: So what are some of the new things that you guys are doing because it sounds like you’ve got a pretty sweet setup and it would be tempting to just spend all your time, I don’t know, marketing that product, which I’m sure you do plenty of that. But yeah, what’s some of the new innovations that you guys are coming up with to make email even better?

Kevin: So what are some of the new things that you guys are doing because it sounds like you've got a pretty sweet setup and it would be tempting to just spend all your time, I don't know, marketing that product, which I'm sure you do plenty of that. But yeah, what's some of the new innovations that you guys are coming up with to make email even better?

Mat: It’s a good question because one of the things about us is that we kind of in a 37signal-ey type of way, don’t have a lot of features that other products do have mostly because we’re very focused on designers and we try and we’re not going to add something just because everybody else does it if it doesn’t actually help the designer sell the product to their client.

Mat: It's a good question because one of the things about us is that we kind of in a 37signal-ey type of way, don't have a lot of features that other products do have mostly because we're very focused on designers and we try and we're not going to add something just because everybody else does it if it doesn't actually help the designer sell the product to their client.

Kevin: Can I put you on the spot and ask you for a specific example?

Kevin: Can I put you on the spot and ask you for a specific example?

Mat: Well, what I’ll tell you is something which we are now doing but which we haven’t done for five years is auto responders. So autoresponders, it’s when somebody signs up to your list they get an email and then another week they get an email and then another week after they get another email, kind of a series, which is something that was very common when Campaign Monitor even was first built. But it doesn’t get used by a lot of people, it doesn’t make sense. It’s just an additional bit of complexity where it would just sit there and clutter up the interface with something.

Mat: Well, what I'll tell you is something which we are now doing but which we haven't done for five years is auto responders. So autoresponders, it's when somebody signs up to your list they get an email and then another week they get an email and then another week after they get another email, kind of a series, which is something that was very common when Campaign Monitor even was first built. But it doesn't get used by a lot of people, it doesn't make sense. It's just an additional bit of complexity where it would just sit there and clutter up the interface with something.

Kevin: So an autoresponder being an email that is not sent out when you, the designer, press the send button but it is sent out as people subscribe to it?

Kevin: So an autoresponder being an email that is not sent out when you, the designer, press the send button but it is sent out as people subscribe to it?

Mat: Yeah, based on a rule of some sort or it might be based on the fact that this person said their birthday is the 13th of April and it’s now the 13th of April so that will trigger the email to send without you doing anything as the account owner. And that’s something we’ve—as we do with a lot of things—is we kind of actively resist adding complexity unless we really see that there’s a need for it in terms of designers really wanting to help them, which is not the case with autoresponders because designers mostly are not involved in that kind of the marketing side or where it’s a tool that will get some use but which will also help a lot of designers to resell their product. So that’s something which we’re working on and then sometime in the next few months will be released but we will do within in a Campaign Monitor type way, which is not to throw in every possible option just to cover the core things especially for the case where some company’s coming to their web designer saying we need a product that has this 483 features but actually, we’ll only use about five of them.

Mat: Yeah, based on a rule of some sort or it might be based on the fact that this person said their birthday is the 13th of April and it's now the 13th of April so that will trigger the email to send without you doing anything as the account owner. And that's something we've—as we do with a lot of things—is we kind of actively resist adding complexity unless we really see that there's a need for it in terms of designers really wanting to help them, which is not the case with autoresponders because designers mostly are not involved in that kind of the marketing side or where it's a tool that will get some use but which will also help a lot of designers to resell their product. So that's something which we're working on and then sometime in the next few months will be released but we will do within in a Campaign Monitor type way, which is not to throw in every possible option just to cover the core things especially for the case where some company's coming to their web designer saying we need a product that has this 483 features but actually, we'll only use about five of them.

We’re just always trying to keep Campaign Monitor as simple as we possibly can but not so simple that it kind of stops you from being able to use that as a real world product.

We're just always trying to keep Campaign Monitor as simple as we possibly can but not so simple that it kind of stops you from being able to use that as a real world product.

Kevin: The last thing that you guys added along those lines was A/B testing.

Kevin: The last thing that you guys added along those lines was A/B testing.

Mat: That’s right, yes. That’s another good example of something that which was really highly requested and interesting, but actually, it doesn’t get a huge amount of use compared to most of the features in Campaign Monitor.

Mat: That's right, yes. That's another good example of something that which was really highly requested and interesting, but actually, it doesn't get a huge amount of use compared to most of the features in Campaign Monitor.

Kevin: Having seen A/B testing done with tools like the Google Website Optimizer, I know just how messy and confusing those interfaces can be but the way you guys implemented it, it’s basically one radio button that if you’re not looking for that feature it’s not going to get in your eye line and until you actually pick that, the feature, the A/B testing does not appear anywhere else in the user interface. And I think that’s a really nice way to do it, this thing that there’s one well placed door into it and unless you go through that door, it’s not going to make the rest of the experience any more difficult.

Kevin: Having seen A/B testing done with tools like the Google Website Optimizer, I know just how messy and confusing those interfaces can be but the way you guys implemented it, it's basically one radio button that if you're not looking for that feature it's not going to get in your eye line and until you actually pick that, the feature, the A/B testing does not appear anywhere else in the user interface. And I think that's a really nice way to do it, this thing that there's one well placed door into it and unless you go through that door, it's not going to make the rest of the experience any more difficult.

Mat: That’s right because most people still aren’t going to use it and we’ve seen what happens with products when you just add everything that’s requested. We’ve got an enormous list of things which have being requested. We do a very small amount of them.

Mat: That's right because most people still aren't going to use it and we've seen what happens with products when you just add everything that's requested. We've got an enormous list of things which have being requested. We do a very small amount of them.

The other good thing we’ve just added, the mobile web app view of Campaign Monitor. So if you go to your Campaign Monitor account on your iPhone or your other mobile web browsing device, you’ll see not the whole Campaign Monitor account, you’ll see kind of a simplified view which shows you what you’re most likely to be interested in when you’re on the bus or on the train or whatever, which is your reports and you can see who’s opening, like, how is my most recent view campaigns going, which is a really nice thing for people to have after they’ve just sent that email at 4:55 and then left the office.

The other good thing we've just added, the mobile web app view of Campaign Monitor. So if you go to your Campaign Monitor account on your iPhone or your other mobile web browsing device, you'll see not the whole Campaign Monitor account, you'll see kind of a simplified view which shows you what you're most likely to be interested in when you're on the bus or on the train or whatever, which is your reports and you can see who's opening, like, how is my most recent view campaigns going, which is a really nice thing for people to have after they've just sent that email at 4:55 and then left the office.

Kevin: Well, I think that about covers everything I wanted to talk about today. Did you have anything else you wanted to mention?

Kevin: Well, I think that about covers everything I wanted to talk about today. Did you have anything else you wanted to mention?

Mat: I don’t think so. I don’t think we’ve got anything really to cover there.

Mat: I don't think so. I don't think we've got anything really to cover there.

Kevin: I put the word out on Twitter asking if anyone had any questions for you and I got a couple back and they were along the lines of “I would like to ask Campaign Monitor if they will marry me.”

Kevin: I put the word out on Twitter asking if anyone had any questions for you and I got a couple back and they were along the lines of “I would like to ask Campaign Monitor if they will marry me.”

You guys have a lot of fans out there. The people who use your service, I don’t know… you really must appeal to that designer group because certainly, once people start using you they don’t seem to be disappointed.

You guys have a lot of fans out there. The people who use your service, I don't know… you really must appeal to that designer group because certainly, once people start using you they don't seem to be disappointed.

Mat: That’s always nice to hear and I think that we’re probably not technically allowed to marry people. I guess we could have an affair of some kind but maybe send us an email about that.

Mat: That's always nice to hear and I think that we're probably not technically allowed to marry people. I guess we could have an affair of some kind but maybe send us an email about that.

Kevin: There you go, Susan, you have your answer.

Kevin: There you go, Susan, you have your answer.

Mat: Because I think because we are designers mostly – at least half of the business we ever have is developers, web dev guys, so you know we know what we would have liked to have at the time when we were still doing client work and so that’s what we’re still working on and so we still keep in touch with designers that way.

Mat: Because I think because we are designers mostly – at least half of the business we ever have is developers, web dev guys, so you know we know what we would have liked to have at the time when we were still doing client work and so that's what we're still working on and so we still keep in touch with designers that way.

The only thing I would like to say probably is if you’re a designer and you still kind of have that anti-HTML email viewpoint that maybe it’s time to kind of rethink that a little bit because whether you use Campaign Monitor or you do it yourself or you use some other service, which there are plenty of good ones, you know it’s something that’s going to keep growing and it’s a good opportunity for you.

The only thing I would like to say probably is if you're a designer and you still kind of have that anti-HTML email viewpoint that maybe it's time to kind of rethink that a little bit because whether you use Campaign Monitor or you do it yourself or you use some other service, which there are plenty of good ones, you know it's something that's going to keep growing and it's a good opportunity for you.

Kevin: Definitely. Whatever you believe, your clients, your boss, whatever, are likely to believe something a little different.

凯文：是的 。 Whatever you believe, your clients, your boss, whatever, are likely to believe something a little different.

Mat: Absolutely.

Mat: Absolutely.

Kevin: Alright. Well, thanks very much for joining us, Mat. We really appreciate it.

凯文：好吧。 Well, thanks very much for joining us, Mat. We really appreciate it.

Mat: Thanks so much for having me.

Mat: Thanks so much for having me.

Kevin: And thanks for listening to the SitePoint Podcast. If you have any thoughts or questions about today’s interview, please do get in touch. You can find SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, and you can find me on Twitter @sentience.

凯文：感谢您收听SitePoint播客。 如果您对今天的采访有任何想法或疑问，请保持联系。 你可以在Twitter上找到SitePoint @sitepointdotcom ，你可以找到我的Twitter @sentience 。

Visit sitepoint.com/podcast to leave a comment on this show, and to subscribe to get every show automatically. We’ll be back next week with another news and commentary show, with our usual panel of experts.

Visit sitepoint.com/podcast to leave a comment on this show, and to subscribe to get every show automatically. We'll be back next week with another news and commentary show, with our usual panel of experts.

This episode of the SitePoint Podcast was produced by Karn Broad, and I’m Kevin Yank. Bye for now!

This episode of the SitePoint Podcast was produced by Karn Broad , and I'm Kevin Yank. 暂时再见！

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Mike Mella的主题音乐。

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

谢谢收听！ 欢迎使用下面的评论字段让我们知道我们的状况，或者继续讨论。

翻译自: https://www.sitepoint.com/podcast58-html-email-with-mat-patterson/