Creative Leisure Systems provides a range of stimulating child entertainment products aimed at businesses whose customers often have toddlers with them.

One of the most difficult hurdles to overcome in email creation for a designer is its regressive nature. Whilst the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and browser developers improve and enhance at an almost inhuman rate html mail delivery has kept its front foot firmly in the past.

The restrictiveness of its HTML4.01 foundations can cause many a headache, unavoidable use of tables for structure, forced ‘web-safe' colour schemes and so many essential present day CSS attributes unavailable. A beautifully crafted design in Photoshop can soon become a blocky unyielding behemoth, far from the designer's original concept.

So what preparation tasks can be taken onboard before working on that all important eshot or newsletter?

What are semantics? Simply put, semantics are about putting everything in its place; a series of design principles that have been around since Gutenberg looked at his Granny’s washing mangle and thought ‘I can print a newsletter with that’.

Semantics within web design has been a hotly debated subject in recent years, since the structuring of web documents has become more linear. Regardless, there are many valid reasons for ensuring your site pages and emails use well-formed semantic markup.