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I’m in the process of updating MLive’s newsletters, and it surely isn’t as easy as it looks.

Contrary to what some believe, newsletters remain a very powerful marketing tool and a great way to get out the news on your site. And the nicer-looking and more usable you can make it, the more likely people are to use it.

But hold on, everyone. Before you rush out to create a flashy newsletter with big images, gradients and moving parts, take some time to read through the issues affecting newsletters:

1. Most email readers don’t support external style sheets. That means you if you link to your CSS files within the heads section of your HTML newsletters, recipients will likely receive a mess of text and images. Learn to love inline CSS instead.
2. Never use<style>, <link> and selectors. Popular email apps, such as GMail, Hotmail and others enjoy stripping your newsletters of any CSS (see above). The email-standards project has reports on which email readers offer the most support (GMail one of the worst).
3. Size matters; Keep it small! Many email readers won’t accurately display a newsletter larger than 650px wide. Design the format to be less than that and keep your best content above the fold.
4. Tables still rule. Forget floats and margins, email readers ignore them. Check out this CSS-Tip for using tables to manage the newsletter design:

A vary[sic] common technique is to set a table with a 100% width with a nested table inside of it that is centered with a static width. This seems to work very well. The outer table is also your big chance to set the background-color for the whole email.

I only realized this information recently after putting together a fancy environmental newsletter for the Bay City Times: Saginaw Bay Watershed Watch. The newsletter is cool because it uses CSS to format RSS feeds from our newspaper blogs, which allows the newspaper to control what information goes onto the newsletter without making them learn how to tinker with HTML.

But like I said before, CSS and email readers refuse to play nicely together. When I get it all figured out, I’ll post the anatomy of the newsletter that looks good and displays appropriately in various readers.

What problems have you experienced formatting your newsletters? I’d love some pointers!