In my last post, I referred to the handling of images by "client emails." Client emails are the applications you use to read your email including Gmail, AOL, Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and many many more.
A lot of the discussion about how different applications you use to read your emails handle images and the effect that has on the effectiveness of your email is not written in a way to help those who are less technical understand the impact. This post is designed to help explain to "non-techies" what all of this means.
The application you use to read your email displays images used for many things including site or email navigation (links to sections of a web site), to display an ad in a certain way i.e. controlling the font usage or the space around the ad.
It is usually a designer who wants to make sure an ad looks a particular way - font size, font color, photo of the product or person, and so forth. To accomplish this designers create images exactly the way they want them to look and then embed that into an email. See the Macy's example here. (middle of the page)
What do you mean by navigation? On the top of a web site or some emails, there are links to sections of a web site. Those links sometimes change when you run your mouse over them. Most of the time those are images.
Are my images of my office building, or office personnel for example affected by this? Yes, anything that is an image is affected.
It is usually a designer who wants to make sure an ad looks a particular way - font size, font color, photo of the product or person, and so forth. To accomplish this designers create images exactly the way they want them to look and then embed that into an email. See the Macy's example here. (middle of the page)
What do you mean by navigation? On the top of a web site or some emails, there are links to sections of a web site. Those links sometimes change when you run your mouse over them. Most of the time those are images.
Are my images of my office building, or office personnel for example affected by this? Yes, anything that is an image is affected.
Now that the definition of images is clearer, we move on to ALT tags.
Alt tags have been around since the beginning of the html code. The ALT tag refers to "Alternate" — some text added to the code to be displayed if the image is not displayed. This is an important consideration. With the default of most email applications set to NOT display images, this text is what appears instead (to complicate things more, some emails do not display the Alt tag). This Alt text can be used to encourage the receiver to load the images (usually done by pressing a "load images" button in the email application). With this in mind, go back to this post and see the examples of emails with the images off.
Alt tags have been around since the beginning of the html code. The ALT tag refers to "Alternate" — some text added to the code to be displayed if the image is not displayed. This is an important consideration. With the default of most email applications set to NOT display images, this text is what appears instead (to complicate things more, some emails do not display the Alt tag). This Alt text can be used to encourage the receiver to load the images (usually done by pressing a "load images" button in the email application). With this in mind, go back to this post and see the examples of emails with the images off.
Hopefully this has helped clear up this previous post for more of you. Go ahead and re-read it.
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