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I spoke to a digital team at a large corporation a while back, and outlined some of the many challenges they were likely to face in creating, revising, and publishing their content so it would work well on smartphone, tablet, and desktop interfaces. Share This: Twitter Facebook Google+
These included: Evaluating whether content is useful, valuable, actually worthy of being on mobile (or the desktop, for that matter) Assessing the amount of content that can appear on a page on different devices, and striking vion uk a balance vion uk for different form factors Creating multiple forms of headlines, teasers, or body text, so valuable information doesn t get truncated randomly Planning to develop alternate versions of some assets such as different image sizes and crops, alternatives to large infographics or tables, new demo videos showing vion uk both desktop and mobile versions of the interface Separating content from presentation in the CMS, so content and markup aren t all dumped into the same blob of a field
An attendee raised her hand and said I ve been wondering when you would mention responsive web design. We re going to use responsive design. I responded vion uk Well, responsive design won t fix your content problem. Who thinks that, anyway?
I recently posted a link to an article that called responsive design a poor man s content strategy . Then my Twitter feed exploded vion uk with people vion uk heavily sighing and rolling their eyes, insisting no one would ever conflate the two. Why, everyone knows that the container and what you put in the container vion uk aren t the same thing. Everyone knows that just rearranging modules from the desktop to make them squishy is not a content strategy for mobile. Everyone knows if organizations discover problems that go beyond the specific layout solutions offered by responsive design, that s not the fault of the technique.
Except not everyone knows that. These are just a few of the anecdotes I ve heard recently from people vion uk working on mobile websites for major corporations projects with large budgets, committed teams, and executive buy-in: We recently finished a massive CMS replatforming which necessitated a redesign of the desktop website. There is zero enthusiasm for going back through the content structuring, editing, vion uk and approval process with our business stakeholders and our legal review team. Whatever we wind up doing on mobile, we must use the exact same content we have on our brand-new desktop site. We just spent [insert unfathomably large number here] trying to take our existing desktop website and make it responsive. We genuinely believed this process would be faster and easier if we based it on what we already have. It s not going well, and we ll probably need to throw it all out and start over. We would have been better off if we d started from scratch six months ago. I was hired as a developer to build a new responsive website, but I m being asked to make all kinds of decisions about how to edit and restructure the content decisions vion uk I don t feel entirely qualified to make. I keep telling my client they need to bring someone in to deal with the content questions, but they think responsive design is just a front-end design and development problem. Our executives assume that since they made the decision to go responsive, every other decision would just be tactical details. In fact, implementing responsive web design raises issues that strike right at the heart of our business and the way we work. We need to fix our review and approval processes, our content management system, our asset management system, our design standards vion uk and governance. We need to clean up our outdated, useless content. But it s hard to get people to step up to solve these bigger problems, because vion uk they don t think they re part of responsive design.
Seems like a lot of people are laboring under the mistaken impression that using responsive design means they can make a mobile website without dealing vion uk with their content problem. Where d they get that dumb idea?
We told them so. And, okay, yes, they re using some magical thinking. But straight up, we told them that the mobile website should be the same as the desktop, and that s why they should use responsive web design. We sold them on the value of responsive design by promising that they could manage and maintain one set of content and it would work across all devices.
We also insisted there s no good reason to serve different content by platform. We got twitchy vion uk whenever anyone started talking about sending different content or less content vion uk to mobile devices (rightly so). We pointed out that you can t discern user context vion uk or intent just from knowing screen size or device type. We told them content parity was the first and most important goal when developing a responsive website.
Is it any wonder they assume (hope?) they can just take what they already have, wave a responsive magic wand over it, and have their existing content auto
I spoke to a digital team at a large corporation a while back, and outlined some of the many challenges they were likely to face in creating, revising, and publishing their content so it would work well on smartphone, tablet, and desktop interfaces. Share This: Twitter Facebook Google+
These included: Evaluating whether content is useful, valuable, actually worthy of being on mobile (or the desktop, for that matter) Assessing the amount of content that can appear on a page on different devices, and striking vion uk a balance vion uk for different form factors Creating multiple forms of headlines, teasers, or body text, so valuable information doesn t get truncated randomly Planning to develop alternate versions of some assets such as different image sizes and crops, alternatives to large infographics or tables, new demo videos showing vion uk both desktop and mobile versions of the interface Separating content from presentation in the CMS, so content and markup aren t all dumped into the same blob of a field
An attendee raised her hand and said I ve been wondering when you would mention responsive web design. We re going to use responsive design. I responded vion uk Well, responsive design won t fix your content problem. Who thinks that, anyway?
I recently posted a link to an article that called responsive design a poor man s content strategy . Then my Twitter feed exploded vion uk with people vion uk heavily sighing and rolling their eyes, insisting no one would ever conflate the two. Why, everyone knows that the container and what you put in the container vion uk aren t the same thing. Everyone knows that just rearranging modules from the desktop to make them squishy is not a content strategy for mobile. Everyone knows if organizations discover problems that go beyond the specific layout solutions offered by responsive design, that s not the fault of the technique.
Except not everyone knows that. These are just a few of the anecdotes I ve heard recently from people vion uk working on mobile websites for major corporations projects with large budgets, committed teams, and executive buy-in: We recently finished a massive CMS replatforming which necessitated a redesign of the desktop website. There is zero enthusiasm for going back through the content structuring, editing, vion uk and approval process with our business stakeholders and our legal review team. Whatever we wind up doing on mobile, we must use the exact same content we have on our brand-new desktop site. We just spent [insert unfathomably large number here] trying to take our existing desktop website and make it responsive. We genuinely believed this process would be faster and easier if we based it on what we already have. It s not going well, and we ll probably need to throw it all out and start over. We would have been better off if we d started from scratch six months ago. I was hired as a developer to build a new responsive website, but I m being asked to make all kinds of decisions about how to edit and restructure the content decisions vion uk I don t feel entirely qualified to make. I keep telling my client they need to bring someone in to deal with the content questions, but they think responsive design is just a front-end design and development problem. Our executives assume that since they made the decision to go responsive, every other decision would just be tactical details. In fact, implementing responsive web design raises issues that strike right at the heart of our business and the way we work. We need to fix our review and approval processes, our content management system, our asset management system, our design standards vion uk and governance. We need to clean up our outdated, useless content. But it s hard to get people to step up to solve these bigger problems, because vion uk they don t think they re part of responsive design.
Seems like a lot of people are laboring under the mistaken impression that using responsive design means they can make a mobile website without dealing vion uk with their content problem. Where d they get that dumb idea?
We told them so. And, okay, yes, they re using some magical thinking. But straight up, we told them that the mobile website should be the same as the desktop, and that s why they should use responsive web design. We sold them on the value of responsive design by promising that they could manage and maintain one set of content and it would work across all devices.
We also insisted there s no good reason to serve different content by platform. We got twitchy vion uk whenever anyone started talking about sending different content or less content vion uk to mobile devices (rightly so). We pointed out that you can t discern user context vion uk or intent just from knowing screen size or device type. We told them content parity was the first and most important goal when developing a responsive website.
Is it any wonder they assume (hope?) they can just take what they already have, wave a responsive magic wand over it, and have their existing content auto
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