Sending text-based e-mails is easy, but making them fancy with colors, background, tables or other HTML tricks is another story altogether. Not all e-mail programs will accept all HTML-generated messages.

Some of our clients sidestep some requirements by subscribing to services that do this for them by providing templates. While some of these can help you create fancy e-mails, they’re not perfect. Spam catchers often restrict messages that are sent from Constant Contact, for instance.

But you can still send custom, fancy HTML e-mails without using someone else’s template with Premailer. This service cleans up your existing HTML file and puts it into a format that most e-mail programs can use, or at least alerts you to red flags so you can clean up your files yourself.

Give it a shot; this site has a sample set up so you can see how it works.

When going over the designs for his website, a client of mine said, “If we put our newsletter on our website, why do we need to e-mail it to people too?”

My answer: “Because they don’t know it’s there!”

It’s a very common question, and a common misconception. Just because you build a website doesn’t mean that anyone knows it’s there. And it’s not a guarantee they’ll come.

In fact, people are fickle. You have to beat them over the head to make them visit your site, and then you have to make it easy for them to read your site, navigate your site and anticipate what they’re looking for.

All this takes a lot of research into knowing your audience and working with a company that understands the way humans interact with technology, but here are a few tips and tools you can follow to help bring people to your site and help keep them there:

Learn SEO. Make sure you write the copy on your site to attract the most people and the most search engines with search engine optimization (SEO). We’re hosting a free online seminar on this topic on August 5, 2008, so sign up to learn how.

Send a Newsletter. If you didn’t have an electronic newsletter before, get one now. Publishing news regularly gives you a chance to connect with your audience and connect to them while they’re at their computer. That’s the best time for them to click through to your website. We build newsletters into our content management systems, but many independent companies provide powerful newsletter tools, such as Constant Contact.

Advertise Widely and Often. Advertise your site everywhere. On your invoices, business cards, sticky notes, voice mail recordings, newsletters – everywhere. Slap your URL on it. VistaPrint is one of many companies that provides cheap promotional materials that you can use for advertising.