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In this video we'll start looking at the process of beginning
a newsletter design from scratch, and we'll finish up in the next video.
We've already got templates for our 'Frezz News' and for
our 'Frezz recipes' newsletters, and they were based on the same look.
And what we'll do now is we'll create a template for
the 'Job openings' category from scratch.
There are a few design tips and guidelines that I'd like
to mention along the way that you might find helpful
but they all rely on the one sound advice that I can give
and that is to keep it simple.
The reason is, that different mail clients
(that is the programs that people use to read their mail)
interpret your design slightly differently
so if you have a complex design, you have a good chance
that it will be incorrectly interpreted.
Okay, so what I'll do first is I'll go to my newsletter subscriber overview
and I'll choose the relevant category to get the right list.
Now, I can go back and do this later if I had wanted to, and I can also
do this along the way, as we've seen previously.
Then I'll go into 'Send Newsletter'. And here, instead of loading a draft
as previously, I'll just go in and just fill in some content.
So for the heading I'll write 'Job positions at Frezz'.
I've briefly mentioned in an earlier video
the 'Edit layout area' next to the HTML radio button selection for type.
It would be possible to create a shell or a wrapper here
where we can build a graphical structure.
And that would be a good technique if you were just intending
to write text in the HTML area, as if you were working
in a word processing program.
But what we're going to here is to build a structure directly
in our HTML editing window, because I'll want to add text
in various areas, and as we'll see, it's not going to be in one clump.
So what I'll do is create a table with the table button over here
in the 'rich text editor' toolbar. And we see that we'll come to
the table editing interface, which may be familiar territory
for many of you, who have worked with basic text editing in Tangora.
I should just touch on the use of tables as a building block here
because some might question why we use what can be considered
an old fashioned tool. Some of you may be familiar with Tangora's
'Visual Designer' tool, which can be used to create layouts
based on 'div' elements, which is the currently preferred way
for making a layout for the web. That's all well and good
but in the world of newsletters, based on the keep it simple principle
we're well advised to stick with tables.
On a relative note, we should also try to avoid CSS or typographies
if we can, and stick with rich text editor styling
or indeed, tweaking the HTML.
Okay, well, I'm not going to review all the settings here
but I just want to use what I need for the job at hand.
And the first thing I want to consider is the width of my newsletter.
You'll also probably want to keep it rather slim
to ensure that your average viewer can see the whole e-mail
without having to scroll or expand the view. I'll take 500px as my width.
I want to add a little bit of space on the left and the right
and so I'll need to use 4 columns, so I have two spacer columns.
And here, I'll, under 'Unit of measurement'
choose pixels, and then I'll just type in 20, 230, 230, and 20
which gives a total of 500px.
I'll also want to have some rows, where I can have room for
yeah, a header image, an intro and footer text
and my positions, as well as some spacer rows
which are just going to be empty and hold a position.
So I'll add 8 here, and I'll just hit okay at the bottom.
Before I go any further, I'll make sure to save my work
already now. So I'll hit 'Save draft'
and I'll enter in 'Job openings template' as the name.
Now let's leave the top as a spacer row, and then
in the next couple of rows, we're going to merge
column two and column three together, in order to make room for a headline
and some intro text. And here I'll click on the left hand cell
that I want to affect, and choose
'merge in table > merge with next cell, horizontal'
and I'll do it again here at the bottom,
where I want to have my closing text.
I have a good habit of saving often, so I'll just go down
and hit 'Save draft' again. Okay.
So, in this video, we've built the basic structure for our newsletter
and in the next video, we'll finish up our work.