By Richard Hill, VP & Practice Lead for Marketing Automation, Quarry Integrated Communications
As a modern marketer, your task is not about “going mobile.” Not anymore. The question now is,“What’s the best way to get there?” A new technique called Responsive Web Design (RWD) is changing the game and giving B2B marketers a smart new option.
By Richard Hill, VP & Practice Lead for Marketing Automation, Quarry Integrated Communications
As a modern marketer, your task is not about “going mobile.” Not anymore. The question now is,“What’s the best way to get there?” A new technique called Responsive Web Design (RWD) is changing the game and giving B2B marketers a smart new option.
Until recently, “going mobile” for B2B marketers likely meant building a dedicated mobile site —one that detects devices and redirects to a unique version of the site specifically for that device model. The problem is, with literally thousands of mobile device models — each with varying screen sizes —now capable of visiting your site, trying to keep up with the explosion in device diversity has become an impractical, if not impossible, exercise.
Responsive Web Design Changes The Game
RWD has emerged as a more scalable and versatile approach. Perhaps you’ve started to hear this term lately? It’s a white hot topic and for good reason: this technique allows you to better control the web experience you’re delivering your buyers, regardless of what type of device they’re using. Here’s how:
“A responsive web site fluidly adapts its layout, content, even functionality, as screen sizes get smaller (or bigger) or as devices are rotated. It ensures that whether people visit your web site using a smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, even widescreen TV, your brand is delivering a more consistent (but not necessarily identical) experience with appropriate layout for the right device at the time.” (Source: The Savvy Marketer’s Guide to Responsive Web Design)
With RWD, you create a single web site that dynamically reconfigures based on screen size, not device model. And it’s all from one code base and under one URL, which means you don’t need to build and maintain separate desktop and mobile sites.
Experience It For Yourself
Many great brands are embracing responsive to create more mobile-friendly web site experiences. Norton Lounge by Symantec, one of the world’s largest e-Commerce retailers and software companies, is one such example. You can also find a great collection of web sites using responsive web design at mediaqueri.es.
Media queries, a relatively new enhancement of CSS3, are the real secret behind making a site responsive. They are the magic bits of code that allow your site to learn useful information about each visitor’s device (such as screen size, orientation, pixel density and so on) so that on load, your site can conditionally render different layouts (that is, CSS) to optimize the user experience appropriately for different situations. Media queries allow you to match the right experience with the right size of a screen, all from a single code base.
Not Just For Web Sites
RWD isn’t limited to your web site. You can take advantage of these same techniques to ensure your landing pages and even your emails look great on mobile devices.
RWD is becoming the industry best practice. With upsides for search, social sharing, simplified content management and easier site maintenance, not to mention the brand-building user experience for mobile visitors, we recommend (and Google agrees) marketers adopt Responsive Web Design as the industry best practice for meeting the challenge of mobile device proliferation.
Want to introduce the practice of Responsive Web Design to your colleagues? Here’s a quick video you can share.
Richard Hill is VP & Practice Lead for Marketing Automation at Quarry Integrated Communications, a buyer experience firm and Eloqua agency partner.
