Using Quill and a web designer to develop templates

Other references using templates:

Templates in Quill, click here.

Other topical references:

The email module, click here.

Email/drip marketing (multi-phase) campaigns, click here and here.

Creating bulk email lists, click here.

Developing templates

Quill is an excellent product for most word processing and "rich text format" work, but it's not designed to be a complete web/HTML editor.

For that purpose, we recommend PageBreeze (http://www.pagebreeze.com), an excellent and inexpensive ($29.95 for business use or free for personal, educational and not-for-profit use) HTML designer. For others, scan the Internet searching on "html designer free". PageBreeze is quite powerful, with Visual design, drag and drop form building, HTML tag editing and more.

Designing templates

If your template needs are very simple and very basic, go ahead and use Quill to design them. 

However, if your needs are a bit more demanding, use PageBreeze to design your templates from scratch, or you can download some templates, load them into PageBreeze and modify them to suit your needs. 

Either way, once you've got your template, load the HTML content into Quill following the instructions below, save the template and use it as needed in your emails, campaigns or periodic communiqués.  

Template ideas

You can also scan the Internet for template design ideas. Searching on "email template" turns up lots of possibilities, including some free templates at CampaignMonitor (http://www.campaignmonitor.com/templates). Here's an example of one under Elliot Jay Stocks:

After downloading to a desktop computer and unzipping, we located "full_width.html" in the html folder, right-clicked it and viewed it locally in Firefox (not Internet Explorer):

Using downloaded templates

Here are the steps we took after viewing the downloaded template in Firefox:

1. Select View > Page Source in Firefox to open the HTML source page.

2. Select Edit > Select All then Edit>Copy.

3. Start PageBreeze and select File > New Page. Give the page a title, check the File Location at the bottom to ensure it's going to the folder you want then click [OK].

4. Click the [HTML Source] tab and paste in the copied source:

At this point, if you click [Preview ... ] and you will see the template without the content you probably want.

5. Change the content as needed, checking the [Preview ... ] from time to time:

For example:

After designing or modifying the template in your HTML editor:

When you are ready, you need to do a similar copy/paste from PageBreeze into Quill. When you do that, however, the page will likely reference images that are not uploaded. When you view the pasted content in Quill, the images likely won't display.

To solve that, you will need to:

a. Upload the images to a folder in Quill,

b. Re-reference the images' paths in the HTML page to the location in Quill where you have uploaded them.

Here's the whole process:

1. Start a new page in Quill.

2. Select the HTML function: 

2. Copy the HTML from PageBreeze into the HTML in Quill.

3. Back in the Normal mode, select Insert > Image from the Quill menu:

4. From the IMG dialog, click [Browse]. We recommend you create a folder for your templates, perhaps named "images", as we've done here:

5. Move to that folder and upload all the images from the PageBreeze images folder (or wherever your source is):

6. Return to the Normal mode and locate the various images on the web page, right-click each and select Properties to display the IMG dialog.

7. Get the image. Repeat for all the images on your page:  

8. Click File > Preview and Print to see the template.  

9. Save the file with a specific name. You can then open it in Quill again, change the content and resave it under a new name any time you want. That way you can have periodic newsletters, series in a campaign, etc.

10. In future template designs, you can use the same image folder and you can expand it by adding new images as needed.