CMS email skin - question

[EFS Webmaster]

Sorry if this isn't the right place to ask a question however it didn't seem to fit anywhere else and will eventually evolve into a workorder.

Our print campaign designer is working on a few different things for us and I wanted to ask him to develop a template email 'skin' which is consistent with some of the other items he's developed for us. So here is my question...

If our designer creates a general email skin, what format/file type would you prefer the skin to be 'delivered' to you if we wanted it incorporated into the CMS emailer at some point?

Please let me know what options would work so I can pass this info along to him.

[Gerry]

Hi Barry,
The email skin should be in an html file format. Any images used for the html email template skin should be referenced as absolute links within the html file, or attached to the html file locally.

[EFS Webmaster]

Hi Gerry,

My designer isn't an html guy (really just a designer). Can he create the template in photoshop to get started?

he mentioned that web developers can fairly easily convert the photoshop file to html and add the designated links. let me know.

[Gerry]

If your designer can supply the psd (Photoshop) file, that would be perfect.
We would then build the email template using that psd file if you need us to.

[EFS Webmaster]

Gerry,

My designer is asking what the desired dimensions should be for the file (in pixels). Please let me know.

Thanks!

[Gerry]

About 800px X 600px or 1024px x 768px should be fine.

[EFS Webmaster]

Hi Gerry,

My designer just finished up the skin. I'll email it over to you.

Can you please get back to me with a quote for incorporating / applying this "skin" into our emails from within the CMS. I would NOT want this skin to be included within all of the emails that go out. What I was envisioning was a new button (or similar) next to the Email body which would say "Apply Skin?" (yes / no), with no being the default.

If an agent marked "yes", the email body would be wrapped in the skin i'm emailing you. I'd want this feature to work for individual emails or individual emails within a campaign. The individual agent contact information included within the skin would be the contact information for the agent that was actually sending the email (we would just map to the agent photo/contact info already contained within our agent profiles).

Please take a look at the email i'm sending you and let me know. Thanks!

[Gerry]

Hi Barry,
Working on this - will respond later...

[Gerry]

I'd say about 5-6 hours design for converting this skin into an html format that is compatible for email browsers. This involves testing in the Thunderbird and Outlook email browsers.

Programming has estimated that hooking up the design and the backend option to apply the skin to the email will take about 4hrs. "Email templates always take a lot of testing."

Please note, this does not include the CMS functionality you reference above, in post#7 - programming will have to finalize this order by responding to that.

[EFS Webmaster]

So it looks like it takes at least $1K to implement a skin, even after I've given you the final design we developed as a PSD file? Is this correct?

If I have another vendor work on converting the PSD to an HTML file for me, are there specific requirements for the HTML file that I should be aware of so REW could just take the file and focus on programming (vs design)? Please let me know. Thanks!