Step 1

Setup NodeJS and NPM.

NodeJS has incredible cross-platform support and can be installed with a simple download. After setup, I used NPM to install an open source HTML generating package called 11ty.

Step 2

Build the UI.

The 11ty HTML framework allows you to create reusable components and use templating code much like the Twig template engine or Blade template engine for PHP. You can use it to create semantic templates so your IDE doesn't throw errors when you leave open tags for your header and footer.

You can also create dynamic templates that take in unique content like buttons and marketing banners. The below example shows three main folders. Layouts, Reusable Components, and then the Email folder. This structure allows you to work on just the email content you need without having to worry about the header, footer, buttons, or anything else that is shared across multiple email templates.