Over the past several weeks I’ve been discussing the milestones involved in migrating the Outskirts Press web presence and email communication to RWD (responsive web design), which I defined here.
Those milestones were:
- Landings Pages
- Email Communication
- Newsletters
- Author Webpages
- Outskirts Press External
- Outskirts Press Internal
We’ve already discussed the new RWD landing pages and the on-going process of migrating our various forms of email communication with our client-authors. October 15 marked the first newsletter to be formatted online and distributed via email in RWD, and it was a great success. Today was the second such distribution (seeing how today is the closest business day to the first of the month).
The distribution of the newsletter is a three step process. An email version gets sent out via email to the client-authors who have subscribed to it. In the past, this email would contain the entirety of the newsletter content, and in HTML tables that were pretty rigid (non “liquid”) irregardless of device. The result on a desktop monitor was fine, and even on most tablets it looked pretty good. But if you were receiving our emailed newsletter on your smartphone (as more and more people are doing), it was challenging to read because the HTML tables forced the whole design (and therefore the fonts) to be too small for easy viewing.
So step one was to design a new RWD version of the emailed newsletter. And, in doing so, we also truncated the sections so they were shorter (no one likes scrolling forever and ever on their phone), which encourages more click-thrus to our online website version to “read the full story.”
The second step, therefore, was creating that online website version of the newsletter, also in RWD. And you can see that version by clicking here. If you take your mouse and “grab” the corner of your browser window and “slide” it larger or smaller or wider or narrower, you can see how the RWD reacts dynamically to the size of your browser.
The third step is distributing the newsletter content through our various social media channels, which begins with posting it on the Outskirts Press blog, where it is picked up via RSS syndication for distribution to our Twitter and Facebook pages.
Done and done.
And that brings us to the fourth milestone in our full migration to RWD — the author webpages. And I’ll start that (larger) subject next time.
President of Outskirts Press 