Learning HTML the hard way.

Last week I began working on the monthly customer newsletter. This involves writing the introduction, a couple of articles and finding out what improvements and alterations have been made to the Amicus POS system then adding them into an HTML template. At first I thought this task would be easy, and it was, until I had to put the text into the template. I have had a little experience with HTML at university so was familiar with most of the tags, for example < b >. This was ultimately my downfall. For those of you unfamiliar with HTML, say I wanted a part of the text to be bold, I would use the tag < b > then the text I want to be bold and to signify the end of the bold part < / b >.

This is where things went wrong. Assuming I knew what I was doing I jumped in and put the code into the template. However, I had forgotten the all important “/ ” to signify the end of the formatting. This meant that I had “opened” a lot of tags but hadn’t “closed” a single one. Once I had saved, the program I had been using to alter the template freaked out and attempted to close all the open tags. The next time I came back to edit the template there were hundreds of < strong > < / strong > tags throughout the code, making it impossible to do anything with.

After spending a long time combing through the code and removing all the unnecessary tags, and then realising I should have just started a new template, I again saved and the layout of the newsletter had changed and put images in places they shouldn’t be causing the text to be awkward. Wrongly assuming it would be faster to find the cause of the problem than start a new template I began to look for the problem in the code. I searched for ages without success. I was about to give up and start a new template when Shirly spotted that one of the images was missing an alt=””. I have no idea why this should affect the formatting but it did.

So that was my first experience with the HTML newsletters. Since then I have started on the next newsletter and am pleased to say I have learned from my previous experience and so far there have been no problems. I hope you enjoy the newsletters even more after hearing the pain I had to go through to get it sent out!