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As you may have noticed, search the Facebook widgets on many of your homepages changed at the end of last week. Facebook stopped supporting the widgets that we were using so the development team went ahead and changed them (if we had done nothing, visit the other widgets would’ve just stopped working).
The new Facebook plugin (which you can check out in the first attached screenshot) works well but Facebook didn’t set this plugin to be as responsive as we wanted it to be so our development team came up with a way to put this widget in a module that could be more responsive.
Facebook seemingly didn’t realize the importance of responsive design in creating their content.
Thankfully, we do.
This leads us to “John’s Monday Tip of the Week.”
As you all know, making our sites responsive was one of our top priorities last year and now that priority is paying off. A recent news story noted that Google is giving websites that are responsive higher rankings than sites that are not. (source: http://tinyurl.com/o9vufqf) partially because users are becoming more and more accustomed to viewing websites on mobile devices. In February of 2014, CNN.com even reported that “Mobile apps overtake PC Internet usage in U.S.” (source: http://tinyurl.com/mcpoqno).
That was thirteen months ago and since then, mobile has only grown.
Last year, the developers did a great job in making the Newstalk sites responsive BUT we want to ensure that every element of your sites is responsive too.
That’s something that should definitely be a priority for your stations. In other words, if you created a back page with a table (with a set width and height) a few years ago, that table is not responsive to mobile devices. In fact, that table is standing in the way of mobile users reading/appreciating/clicking on your content in an easy manner.
What we want to do is make sure all of the pages– and all of the content on them– are responsive.
Here’s a great example of a recent situation I encountered that touches on this very subject.
I recently worked with the great team in Minneapolis (at AM1280ThePatriot.com) on their advertiser’s page: http://www.am1280thepatriot.com/pages/wide/advertisers. For some reason, some of the pics on that page were showing up in one size in one browser and much smaller in another browser. We looked at the page together and saw that there was a table in there. The station and I worked together and deleted that table and replaced it with a responsive template.
Now if you go to that page in Internet Explorer or you go to that page in Firefox, the images look the same AND when you go to that page on a mobile device, the page is responsive to the size of your screen. That means more mobile users are able to see that page clearly and click on some of the content there. A win-win for everyone.
Now, in encouraging us to make all of our pages responsive, the development team created responsive templates we could use in the admin tool.
In order to access these templates, all you need to do is log into the Newstalk admin tool and click on “Virtual Pages.” Click on “Create New” there and then in the box that appears, there’s an option called “Insert.” If you click “Insert,” you can see “Insert Template.” (See attached screenshot) Once you click that option, you can see some of the responsive templates they created that would help you make your content responsive (see the template options in the third attached screenshot).
Going forward, when you are creating a back page, I would definitely suggest using one of these templates. Additionally if you’re using an older back page and don’t know if the content on it is responsive, let me know and we can work to make it responsive so that every person can view it easily and comprehensively on their mobile devices.
Facebook didn’t make their latest plugins responsive to smaller devices but we are moving forward to make all of our content responsive. Considering how big the mobile market is getting, doesn’t that mean we’re smarter than Facebook?
This has been “John’s Monday Tip of the Week.”
Best,
John
Images: http://cdn.saleminteractivemedia.com/ntbase/media/monday/Insert_Template_Button_6.22.2015.JPG
http://cdn.saleminteractivemedia.com/ntbase/media/monday/Insert_Template_Options_6.22.2015.JPG
http://cdn.saleminteractivemedia.com/ntbase/media/monday/WWTC_New_facebook_Plugin_6.22.2015.JPG