As you're probably aware, we provide free website, newsletter and logo templates for you to download and use as you please. If you're using SendStudio, then adding a newsletter template to your control panel is a breeze. In this article I'll show you how it's done.

Step 1. Download and edit your template

By visiting our free template section, you can select a newsletter template that you'd like to use.

We also give away a free exclusive template in each of our newsletters. For this tutorial, i'll be using an exclusive template found in our April newsletter.

This is by far one of my favourite newsletter templates. It's got a simple yet elegant look and feel, and is extremely easy to update.



Once you've downloaded the zip file, simply extract it into a folder somewhere on your computer.

Open it up in your favourite HTML editor, (I use EditPlus, a fancy text editor) and edit your template as you see fit (for example, replace "Company Name" with your business name, etc).

The extracted template contains some images, so we will need to upload these images and change the HTML URL in the template to point to a folder on our web server.

For example, let's say that I uploaded my images into this folder:
http://www.interspire.com/newsletter/

I would then open up my template HTML file and change the path of the images from:

src="bkg_header3.png" to src="http://www.interspire.com/newsletter/bkg_header3.png"

In this template, you'll notice that there are two images. One is used as a background image, and the other as a thumbnail image.

By selecting "Create Template" from the "Templates" menu in the SendStudio control panel, you can follow the wizard to create your new template. Select the name and type, and hit next. Click the "Browse" button to upload the template from your hard drive.

Select the template and hit the "Save" button.

Building a newsletter based on this new template is easy. When creating your newsletter, you'll be prompted to select a template. The new template should now appear in the template list, ready for you to use.

Click on the template and follow the prompts. You'll see your template appear in the WYSIWYG editor ready for you to edit.

Using a template as the basis of each of your newsletters is a good idea because it reduces the time to create each newsletter, and it provides a consistent look and feel that your subscribers will come to recognize.

If you're a web designer building a template for your client, SendStudio makes it extremely easy for them to create and maintain their own newsletters, without ever having to start from scratch.

SendStudio (version 4.15 and above) also supports restricted editing, so that you can lock your template, meaning that only specific areas can be edited.

This is a simple process of adding comment tags around the areas that you would like your clients to be able to edit. For example:

<font style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11px; color:#669998; font-weight: bold;">
<!-- #BeginEditable -->
My newsletter content
<!-- #End Editable -->
</font>

By adding these areas before uploading your template, you can be sure your client won't mess with any design or layout aspects of the template that they weren't meant to, thus keeping your design work intact.

I hope you've found this tutorial useful. Don't forget that we provide lots of free newsletter templates to help get you started.

Have fun :)