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How to create submenu HTML?

I want to create an HTML email to send to clients about analytics on a platform, what should i use to create this?

  • Im creating an HTML email to send to users of my application on a monthly/weekly basis. The users are small businesses so i'd like to make a visual representation of the analytics as opposed to making it raw data focused. Also im not very technical so if there are web tools or apps to help me create that would be ideal.

  • Answer:

    The problem with HTML mails are that in most clients HTML is limited, you can not use JavaScript, or embeds (flash), or most CSS formating rules, and I strongly doubt integrated MathML and SVG to be allowed. Your best bet would be to generate images that you embed into the e-mail itself, but unless you are using the same image for all mails, or are using a an email client to do all mails manually, it gets rather complicated. You could also simply put an img tag in the email that points to an image on a web server. You can do a form letter in any e-mail client, leaving place-holders like %CLIENT_NAME%, and then replace each place-holder with the actual text required and sending it off using PHP or Perl or whatever. Some good examples can be found here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10763925/making-a-form-letter-with-php-with-text-content-from-a-variable-from-the-post To make the graph if it requires dynamic data, you can do a small script with the user name as a hash as input, like <img src="http://www.example.com/email/graph.php?u=ee11cbb19052e40b07aac0ca060c23ee">. And it would then match a database with the hash as a search parameter, like SELECT * FROM `usrDataTbl` WHERE md5(`usrDataTbl`.`username`) = 'ee11cbb19052e40b07aac0ca060c23ee';. Sidenote: using md5 on a column will slow down the search somewhat, but in this case it might be better this way in order to prevent users to view other users data. To use this dynamic image, you can use form-letter generator method I suggested above, and simply make a field like %ANALYTICS_GRAPH% and replace it with img-tag with the user-specific hash. You can find many fine pre-made and simple graph-drawing libraries like http://pchart.sourceforge.net/ with a Google search. For a single chart I found an article here: http://www.netmagazine.com/features/20-more-data-visualisation-tools

Lars Johan Olof Lidström at Quora Visit the source

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My team at Ramen recently spun out some internal functionality into a standalone product that does just this: https://ChartURL.com You can generate charts on the fly using an "Encrypted URL" scheme, or you can send us huge amounts of data and we'll return a Short URL that'll resolve to an image. These URLs can be used in web apps & mobile apps, but the original intent was email charts so it's pretty much exactly what you're looking for. Given what you're asking, it would be hard to make this work without any development. However, we've made it really quite easy. Hope that helps!

Ryan Angilly

You mention that you're not very technical. In that case I would recommend using an email service such as http://mailchimp.com/ or http://www.constantcontact.com. These services can be used to maintain your mailing list and provide analytics on your emails. They also make it fairly easy to format messages without knowing a lot of code. For your visuals you will want to create images in .jpg or .png format. These would be uploaded to the server when you create your message. If you generate charts from a spreadsheet such as Excel you could create images from those or if you are familiar with Illustrator you could redraw them in that to make them look better.

Heidi Cool

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