If baking a cake was like building a fancy email...

12th January 2012 :: Author: Andrew Cope, Managing Director, Evergreen

Our customers expect a certain standard of quality from the sites we build, but those aren't the only standards we have to deal with.

Here at Evergreen, we spend a lot of time writing code, and trying to improve compatibility across multiple browsers. This task has become much easier over the years, as the main browsers have moved towards following web-standards entirely. However with every new version of a browser comes a new interpretation of the web-standards, leaving us with the task of checking our websites with the new browsers, as per the standards expected of us, from our customers.

These standards don't stop there. Many of our websites send out formatted emails, and instead of a browser converting all the lovely code (HTML) we develop, it's an email client that has to do the display correctly.  Whilst web browsers have been steadily moving towards complete standards compliance, it would seem email clients are going backwards, and this isn't because of the increase in the amount online clients. No, instead, whilst some clients take away some of the hard work we have put in by simply removing bits of code making up the emails, others insert bits of code.

If baking a cake was as difficult as building a fancy email, all your best efforts to make a carrot cake would sometimes produce a chocolate cake, sometimes an omelet, and sometimes a bowl of dog food.

Have we let that stop us? No! We at Evergreen like a good challenge, and low and behold, we can make those beautifully formatted emails compatible in just about all clients, by drawing on our extensive expertise.