HB2
To buy or build a template?
I've been doing our company emails for about 2 years. We've come a long way and we always worked with templates that we bought on themeforest and made them work for us. Now one of the new designers has an idea to create a company template that we can use that would match the look and feel of our website. I think it's a great idea and i think it's a step we can make i'm just nervous about coding to make it work on all platforms etc. Thoughts?
Build it yourself. I think it's a worthy exercise to undertake to gain knowledge of how your templates work, and to be able to build templates that fit your goal/subject more closely than anything external could. An added bonus is then when an email client makes a change that breaks everything, you can dive in and fix it yourself.
While it's worth it to learn yourself so you can have a better understanding of how email works and be able to fix certain breaks as Nathan mentioned, there are a plethora of odd quirks within most/all of the major email clients out there and it can take a long time to figure out how to tackle all of them, along with hours of frustration between developing and testing. If time is not on your side, I'm sure there's plenty of people (myself included) who are willing to freelance and build a template for your company at a reasonable price.
If you choose to have someone else build it for you, be sure to design it to be responsive. Responsive layouts take more time and require much more know-how, but vastly increase the audience outreach (of course, depending on the stats of your audience, which I hope you keep track of).
If you're looking for an original template catered specifically to your company that's responsive and may or may not have interactive or dynamic elements, I can help you out if you choose to buy.
Definitely build it yourself or find a agency that has proven their knowledge of email development. Don't allow generic templates to force you into an off-the-shelf model. Lay the ground work for a custom solution that matches your goals and brand experience. Let me know if you need suggestions for people who can help.
Always build. But there is tons of framework to build around out there. No need to start from scratch it you know why you need. But if you want what you want in your mind, start from scratch. Never failed me. If you have a hiccup, post to the discussion or seek out advice on Twitter. Like I said, I've never gone wrong with this methodology. Trying to work with a template is always more difficult, in my opinion.
you can visit themeforest's discussion board to get help
Make it yourself! There are number of frameworks available on net those can be utilized to make it easily. In addition, you can also take sort of idea about layout from open source templates. As such, using a pre built templates are not recommended for commercial use but at least you can see them for a wide initiative.