Responsive, Flexible marketo landing pages

[Anonymous]

This is definitely the future of the web. There was a discussion a bit back, but I realized I should create a specific idea so people can vote on it.

https://community.marketo.com/MarketoDiscussionDetail?id=90650000000PWbrAAG

Here's the discussion thread and Craig really hits the nail on the head when discussing the way that marketo inserts it's elements into the DOM. When you read through the source of a Marketo page the elements aren't in the order I'd expect them to appear given the way I create my website. I've always accepted this and moved on. But it is truly the thing standing in the way of a flexible design. So perhaps the idea is the add order through sequencing as classes or spans. Or allowing items to have relative positioning. I don't know what is easiest to do to allow more flexibility, you guys are much smarter than I, so I'll leave the actual idea to you.

This is no longer the most burning topic to me now that I realize I have the ability to take Marketo forms off site without resorting iframes. So to me I'm a bit ok, but I still create this idea for you, because this is an idea that will only grow stronger as more people understand the potential of responsive websites.

[Anonymous]

This is a great work around, but unfortunately too complicated for the casual marketo user who depends on the WYSIWYG styling elements of the Marketo editor. I full well understand how to implement this solution, but I have a rule that I won't build anything new that I'm the only person who understands how it works. It would be great if Marketo can build on this as a solution and determine a way to allow the standard software to allow this without losing the native functionality.

[Anonymous]

Adam:

I understand what you mean, and we had some debate about that here as well—we didn't want to create a bottleneck in the production process that only two technical Marketo users could address. 

The solution ended being resolved with very tokenized templates. All of our responsive landing pages (the ones with a broken WYSIWYG from this solution) bring their content in with tokens. All pictures, buttons, value propositions, titles, links, and text have tokens.

This had two major advantages in our minds: consistent style guides and huge scalability.

1. Consistent style guides. Using the WYSIWYG from a design perspective brings dangers of imperfect alignment. The grid in the WYSIWYG editor is a suggestion more than a perfect tool, and slight pixel differences in positioning puts an entire page out of harmony. Token use means that elements don't have special size variations, and margins can be precisely 1em as opposed to "that looks about right."
2. Scalability. Now when we create a new campaign, we just clone an existing tokenized, responsive campaign, and then change the appropriate tokens. We don't even touch the WYSIWYG editor. The beauty of this is that we can eliminate the bottleneck altogether—now an account manager can make a new campaign with appropriate landing pages, thank you pages, and email responses, just by changing tokens. No HTML/web design/web development skills necessary after the original setup.

Just thought you might be interested in why we decided to go forward with the solution we chose! 


Best,
Edward Unthank
SEO/Web Specialist
www.yesler.com

[Anonymous]

Ya, i get that that was a nice comprimise for your situation, but I still don't think it's sustainable long-term. One really easy example comes to my head, we create quarterly newsletter & each business unit has 3 or 4 landing pages to read more, times 6. Not going to create a program per, etc.. Ja, there's just got to be an easier solution. This example is really great for a fixed solution in fluidity, but it is a comprimise.

I still wanna push for a solution which allows the users to still have some control over design.