My problem: someone in another department (in another state) needs help designing an email newsletter. She’s on a PC. I have been tasked to help her but I am on a Mac. Previously she made an attempt in Microsoft Publisher which came out rather unprofessional looking. Hence, I was brought in to help. My research on Publisher indicates that it is not worth the electrons it is printed on.
She is an Administrative Assistant with limited page layout/design experience and limited software access. Normally, I would design her something in InDesign or Quark and give her the file to edit as needed each month. However, I suspect that InDesign or another such dedicated page layout program might be beyond her abilities and inclinations and her department’s budget.
The newsletter would be emailed out monthly to donors and other interested parties of our non-profit scientific research institute. We would include active links in the newsletter that can be clicked to open supplemental pages with more information.
Can anyone recommend a simple email newsletter program that both of us can use cross-platform? I tried to get her to use Constant Contact but her department wants to keep the job in-house. Any suggestions would be most welcome.
So you plan to design something and then make it into a PDF and then email the PDF out?
You don’t use InDesign or Quark to make an HTML newsletter. Or Publisher or Word.
An HTML newsletter needs to be made in HTML and often very specific HTML (such as with inline CSS instead of linked CSS, and very clean HTML). It also should be sent using a mail system that is set up to properly handle HTML mail without getting your mail rejected by other servers.
You really do not want to send a ton of emails via your mail system, and especially not PDF emails.
Constant Contact, Vertical Response, Mail Chimp or any other mail system like it is your best bet. They are cross-platform because they are browser-based. They have robust MTAs (mail transfer agents). They have tools to track your newsletter and manage your lists and allow people to unsubscribe.
What you seem to be describing, or what your boss wants, is a snail-mail brochure.
I see your point. Do you know if pdfs be made with embedded links? That’s all they really want…something eye catching, informative with links to further information.
Yes, PDFs can be made with embedded links, if you use Adobe Acrobat Pro. I presume that there are other PDF-creation programs out there that will do this as well, but I’ve mostly used Acrobat.
However, I must remind people that the PDF, despite Adobe’s efforts to cram multimedia features into it, is intended as a file format that preserves page-layout information. You make a PDF, you have to set a page size, and everything is laid out relative to that. Fonts should be and images are embedded in the PDF; they go everywhere the text does, which is why many PDFs are so big.
HTML email, on the other hand, as far as I know, travels without images or embedded media. When it’s opened by a mail reader program, the mail reader can request its images from your server. This image request is optional, and many people disable it due to mistrust of techniques such as ‘web bugs’. Thus, if you are sending HTML email, you may need a server to distribute your images and media.
Also, because the mail is HTML, it can be reflowed by the viewing program, so the formatting of the newsletter needs to be flexible enough to accommodate this. And there are still people who use text-only email (no HTML), so your content needs to be readable even if the pictures are absent.
Design of HTML involves a very different set of constraints than design of PDFs, and while you can certainly brand things so that they look like they belong together, it is very difficult to make HTML and PDF look the same.