I’m guessing that by now, our numerous articles on layout and design have drilled the importance of a clean, professional-looking newsletter into everyone’s head. For anyone who hasn’t been through my broken record routine on this subject, it goes something like this: Inviting people to read your newsletter is like inviting them into your home. If it’s cluttered, disorganized, and full of mismatched colors, you’ll frighten them. So yes, while it may be repetitive, I have spent a lot of time in the past trying to lead people in the right direction with their template design.
But there’s more to your newsletter’s look and feel than just the template. It’s the articles themselves that are supposed to draw your readers’ attention. So for those of you who finished your template ages ago and just want your articles to look good, here are some tips and FAQs to help you keep your content in good shape.
Plain Text or HTML?
Each time you create an article, you’ll have the choice of using either plain text or HTML (by way of a pair of radio buttons that sit below the article body field on the “Edit Article” page). In most cases, you’ll want to use HTML. HTML is what allows you to create spacing, formatting, images, and hyperlinks using the HTML editor. You might occasionally use plain text for a short synopsis that doesn’t require any formatting, but usually you’ll want to be able to enhance the look of your content by using HTML.
Hint: If extra spaces show up in above and below your short descriptions and/or articles, try making these two changes. First, check to see if the description or article is marked as plain text, and if it is, change it to HTML. If it’s already in HTML, look for HTML “paragraph” tags at the beginning and end, as shown below, and then remove them.
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With spaces
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Without spaces
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Upload or Copy/Paste?
The “Add Article” function gives you a variety of options for the input of your content. If you’ve decided to create the article in HTML, you’ll then either upload the content from a MS Word document, or copy/paste it directly into the article field or into the HTML editor.
Which method you decide to use will depend largely on two factors: whether you’re working on the synopsis or the article body, and what sort of document you’re working from. For example, your synopsis may only be a few lines of text, so uploading it from a word document all its own would be overkill. On the other hand, your article body might be composed of a Word document complete with images, formatting and hyperlinks. In this case, it makes more sense to upload the document directly, so all the images, hyperlinks, and formatting will automatically become a part of the HTML for your newsletter.
Upload Method
Copy/Paste Method
Hint: Web and email formatting is usually simpler than document formatting. Think about what you look for visually in a website or email compared to a paper newsletter or marketing piece. Try to keep your fonts, styles, and other kinds of formatting simple, consistent, and clean. This will also make it easier to translate into HTML.
So how should you decide what method to use? There are many variations, but here are a few guidelines. If you’re starting from a plain text, unformatted synopsis, just copy and paste your text directly into the synopsis field. Then, use the HTML editor to add formatting, links, and images. If your synopsis already contains some of these things, open up the HTML editor first, and then copy from Word into the HTML editor, so your formatting will carry over.
For the article body, you’ll most likely either upload from Word into the HTML Editor, or copy/paste from Word. I recommend to most clients that they try both methods for a while, to see which works best for them. But if you’re looking for a place to start, think about whether or not your Word document containing your article body already has images or not. If it does, you’ll most likely want to upload the document, so the images will be placed in the articles automatically. If the document contains no images, you’ll probably want to save some time, and copy it directly into the Editor.
Hint: Certain types of Word formatting, especially bullets and numbers, aren’t perfectly compatible with HTML. If you have an article that contains bullets or similar types of formatting, it usually works best to copy it into the HTML editor. You can also use the Code Sweeper, as described in this issue.
Many of our e-publishers use the following process: They start from a Word document that contains all the content for a particular article (title, synopsis, images, links). First, they upload the entire document into the article body field. Then, they open the editor, where they make any necessary changes, and copy out the title and synopsis for use in the other fields. Then they paste the synopsis and title directly into the appropriate fields, and use the editor to make changes to it if necessary. Using this process is a great way to streamline your workflow and produce neat, professional articles.
Remember, content is the most important part of an e-newsletter. If you want people to pay attention to your words, you’ll want to first make sure those words look good on the page.
