Designing with Constant Contact Templates

By John M Grohol PsyD
November 21, 2005

So there’s this service that many companies use called “Constant Contact.” It’s a simple emailing service that allows companies to send their newsletters or marketing promotions to their own private mailing lists. A basic concept, certainly, and in a space many companies compete for customers in.

As a Web developer, sometimes I’m asked to develop designs for such services and I recently had the “pleasure” of trying to work within the Constant Contact “advanced” templating system. Ouch. What a mess.

First, for reasons known only to them, they chose to implement XHTML instead of the more commonly recognized HTML. Remember, we’re talking email clients here, not Web browsers. Email clients tend to be 1-3 versions behind in terms of the support they have for the most recent Web standards. Forcing all of your customers to code only in XHTML is an unnecessary burden at this point.

Second, if you’re going to require XHTML, at least recognize the spec you’re pretending to code to. XHTML recognizes full support of CSS styles sheets, including the “id” element. For reasons known only to Constant Contact, they don’t implement the “id” element, only the “class” element. That means if you had a meticulously crafted HTML template based upon ID’s instead of classes, you’re pretty much screwed. I converted a template from one to the other, but classes have certain limitations that ID’s do not.

Third, if you’re going to require XHTML and validate it with your own internal checker, please provide more helpful troubleshooting messages others than “There’s an XHTML error on line 403″ (and of course, don’t provide line numbers in your editor!!).

Fourth, if you’re going to implement a third-party support system to support your product, please ensure it’s actually operational 24/7. I tried twice today, hours apart (during normal business hours, mind you) to contact their support department through their support system. Multiple tries both times resulted in a “500 server error” message of no help. Apparently their support system is broken, which is just dandy as you’re trying to get a template finished for a client presentation in short time. So while I’d love to ask them about these unique “features” of their product, they prevent me from doing so.

Now, granted, 90% or more of their customers will never design custom templates (although they should, since a company’s brand is one of their strongest communications), a company shouldn’t be offering such a feature without more extensive usability testing. I’m sure it’s a good product, I just couldn’t tell you based upon my frustrating hours of trying to wrestly with its broken support for standards.

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues, and the intersection of technology and psychology since 1992.