Content Managed Newsletter/Ezine?

Client has asked is it possible to design and develop them an ezine/new开发者_运维百科sletter template that they can manage themselves without any coding knowledge.

Anyone know how I'd go about this, I don't have much experience with email marketing.

Also, how can I use CSS when developing an ezine template? From my experience mercury message, mail chimp etc... all only accept table based layouts?

Update:

I will be designing the template. The template will have text and images, I need a way for the client to be able to edit these images and text without breaking the template code or having to go into the template code.

Can this be done using a WYSIWYG editor?

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For your client to be able to design newsletters on their own, they should look at WYSIWYG editors that some of the third party mail providers have as a feature like MailChimp and MadMimi.

However, I would like to point you to PostageApp, which has a great built in template editor that automatically in-lines HTML and CSS and validates it against popular clients.

I'm the Product Manager for it, so I'm happy to answer any questions you may have about it.

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Constant Contact is the email marketing choice that I see being selected most often by small businesses that do not have any tech skills on board.

http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp

I don't know about e-zine templates but Constant Contact is a staple of doing e-newsletters.

As for using CSS with table layouts--there's no reason why you can't. I've often seen people do something like this:

<table>
   <tr class="coloredrow">
       <td>some stuff here</td>
       <td>more stuff</td>
   </tr>
   <tr>
      <td>some stuff here</td>
       <td>more stuff</td>
   </tr>
   <tr class="coloredrow">
    etc...

It's not necessarily the most up-to-date way of doing things (I prefer jQuery for striping tables myself) but it certainly works. if you wanted to get really ugly about it you could even use inline css right inside the

<tr> 

tag like this

<tr style="background-color:red">.

Hope that helps.