Creating HTMl email signatures

Creating html email signatures seems very simple, but for different reasons it can get very quickly tricky.

1. To start, how should the signature look like, do you have any creative idea? From a technical point of view, what are the possibilities?
2. Then you need a tool to generate it:
3. All the email clients interpret the html in a different way, which means that even if your designed signature looks good in dreamweaver, this is no guaranty of how it will look when displayed in outlook express for example. Thomas Granger wrote an interesting article about html format for email.

With this problems in mind, I have created an online tool to generate html email signatures. It assists you by providing:
1. Design templates, which means you don't need any html or css knowledge, just use the design you like ( and you will still be able to customize it your needs.
2. An online wysiwyg editor, so you don't have to install software on you computer to edit html.
3. The templates are designed to work on most email clients and all the formatting is done with inline css.
And the best part is you pay nothing for this basic functionality. For companies, NGO's or associations using consistent email signatures for all employees is important as it becomes key element of overall branding and enables email recipients to make connections among emails received from various members of this organization. To cover those needs, the paying accounts of the html email signature creator offers:
1. the possibility to define your own signature template
2. import the employee information from the whole company
3. generate and easily generate consistent email signatures for all their employees.
4. Send each signature to the correct mail recipient.

Additional functionalities include:
1. insert a link into the signature which will show a Google map displaying the signature owner's location.
2. Upload picture to the izysign to then use it in the signatures. That way you don't send pictures in you mail attachments.

Beginner's Guide to Web Development

The following article offers a beginner's guide to some of the key acronyms and abbreviations used in the world of web design and web development. As with all industries and sectors, esoteric jargon can be a barrier preventing many people from fully embracing web technologies and all of the potential benefits that they can bring to businesses and individuals alike.

HTML

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is the fundamental language of the web. Basically it tells a web browser what information to display on a web page and how to display it. To that end it can determine the structure of the page (and its content) as well as the formatting or styling (colour and size etc) of the page, although the latter are often controlled by style sheets instead (see CSS below).

The markup primarily uses tags, placed before and after each piece of content, to define what are known as elements. These elements can be individually defined and/or belong to (standard or bespoke) groups which can then be interpreted by the browsers. For example, a portion of text that needs to display as a paragraph should be preceded by a tag and closed by a tag.

The rules (i.e., syntax) that govern the use of HTML and what is standard mark up language are set by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) so that website and browser developers have a consistent language to work with. The latest incarnation of HTML is HTML5, which is intended to meet the needs of the current media-rich, multi-device world of online content, although it is presently still under development. The latest HTML standard is HTML4.01.

CSS

The initials CSS stand for Cascading Style Sheets, but the term is often interchangeable with simply ‘style sheets’. In essence CSS is used to specify the style that would be applied to a web page or set of web pages including, for example, the positioning of elements on the page, colour schemes, background imagery and font formatting.

When used in conjunction with properly defined and identified HTML elements its primary benefit is that it allows styles to be specified only once, in one style sheet, and then applied to multiple elements across either one page or an entire site; rather than having to be specified individually against each occurrence of each element (of which there could be thousands). In short, employing CSS means that all pages on a website can follow the same styling theme using just one style sheet. In addition, the same web page(s) can even link to different style sheets so that it can appear with different styling depending on how that page is viewed. For example, one style sheet can be activated if the user is viewing the site on a mobile device and another if on a PC.

The cascading element of the name refers to the way in which the styling is applied to a particular element following a ‘hierarchy’ of specificity; a style sheet could, on the one hand, tell the browser to display all hyperlinks as blue, but, on the other, tell the browser that all hyperlinks appearing in the footer element should be red. The result would be that, for any links appearing in the footer, the more specific instruction would take precedence and they would display as red.

Gaining an understanding of the terms HTML and CSS, what they do, how they work and how they interact is really the first step in understanding how web pages and sites are put together. In the second part of this article, the terms XML and CMS will also be defined and their role in web development explained.