Take into consideration your own email habits. Do you sit there and go through and read each email thoroughly? Or do you, like many others, skim through emails quickly to determine what is worthy of your attention? With such a short span of time to capture and drive your main points to your audience, your designs must be concise and to the point.

With all these restrictions and disadvantages, it would seem that your email would be very limited and lacking. The trick to utilizing email design to its full potential is to finding that right balance between functionality and aesthetics. Here are some quick helpful tips to get around those pesky limitations:

1) Keep design simple.

Do not overload your design with heavy images, tags, and code! It will only bog it down or increase the chances of errors.

2)   Use inline styles.

Most email clients do not process CSS styles in headers.

3)   Make a Plain text version.

Allow users the option of viewing it in plain text, since not everyone allows HTML emails to come through their mailbox.

4)   Assume images will be blocked.

Never design an email with all images, unless you want to risk people opening a big blank email. You want users immediate access to your email, with or without images showing. This means having real text for headers, links, content that will load immediately.

5)   Utilize your Alt Tags.

Another added solution to the image-blocking problem is to utilize Alt tags. Alt tags give users a better idea what imagery is included in the email, especially when images are blocked by default.

6)   Go back to Tables.

As old-fashioned as it is, tables are very powerful when designing for email. It keeps your email presentable and organized, as most email clients do not process Floating styles. It is also smart to always define the height and width for each cell to ensure that the layout remains intact.

7)   Keep emails no wider than 600 pixels.

With varying monitor sizes from user to user, it is a good idea to keep email designs to a max fixed width. It can be pretty annoying to have a horizontal scroll bar just from opening an email!

8)   Testing, 1,2, 3.

After you’ve designed and coded your email, test it. Several times. What looks good in one email client can look completely different in another, so it’s best to cover as much ground as you can before sending and realizing little errors after.

Emails have grown to be quite a popular form of communication. As the common goal for the majority of businesses is to keep their audience coming back, emails are a great and useful way to not only keep people informed, but to also continue to strengthen your brand and identity. With websites focusing more heavily on functionality and converting traffic, emails pick up where websites leave off. It provides a much more personable method of reaching out and helping develop a stronger relationship between a company and its clients over a period of time.

Have you ever went a day without electricity? I bet not. Try it. Should be interesting. Well, iPhone dependence is becoming more and more common every day. There are so many applications out there that appear to be so helpful, it’s hard to think what you would do without it.

The iPhone can now be used as your very own GPS. GPS systems started out at $900 a piece when they first came out. Now they are going down in price. Who needs a GPS, when you can download an app. to get around on your iPhone for as low as $0.99! The iPhone is now being looked at as the All-In-One, helpful tool. Heck you can even use the thing as a level to put up a picture on the wall!  Yeah, you have the internet to get you to Map Quest from your phone but that takes five-thousand extra steps, so why not get something customized for your phone and your patience.

Again, another new piece of technology, which started out being an auxiliary, is now a necessity for people who are highly adaptive to convenience.

CHECK IT OUT:

5 Navigational iPhone Apps for your curiosity and convenience

iWant is essentially the combination of 3 location based apps:

Restaurant reviews (Yelp, UrbanSpoon), Movie showtimes

(Flixter, Fandango) and Yellow Pages.

G-Park is an Easy-to-use interface for taking a photo of your

parking spot or entering additional notes (if desired), such as

the section or the floor/level you parked on.

Zhiing is a location based messaging utility for sending,

receiving, replying to and forwarding messages with

maps relative to where you’re at now.

Where To? makes it incredibly easy to locate the closest

steakhouse, bank branch, billiard club or anything else

you may be looking for, at the drop of a hat!

With one touch, ETA shows accurate drive-times

from wherever you are to wherever you want to go.

One more click and it tells you the optimal route to take.