Cultureshock Media needed to redesign (FIG. iii) and streamline the weekly production process for their html-rich newsletter. Besides collating and writing the content, they were wasting time coding and testing each newsletter. Furthermore, their mailing distributor’s interface was far too complex to extract any meaningful or digestible statistical information.
Expression Engine was set up to generate the newsletter so that all the editors had to do was input content. And an equally simple-to-update competitions page (FIG. ii) was created and integrated with our mailout distributor.
Campaign Monitor provided the subscription list management tools, distribution and stats tracking reports for each mailout. Their simple interface, campaign creation process and testing suite simplified everything for us.
The trickiest part however was getting the html-rich newsletter to look great in all the major mail programmes (Gmail, Hot Mail, Outlook etc). But with plenty of testing and a dose of pragmatic compromise we created an easily updatable and attractive newsletter (FIG. i).