Why when activating the mobile version of a landing page, does the mobile landing page then appear blank?

[Justin_Cooperm2]

Also, I did also just follow-up and confirm that nothing has changed in our landing page products recently. My guess is someone "activated the free form page for mobile" which caused the issue you're seeing. Obviously, if your page is already handling the responsiveness via media queries, there is no need to "activate for mobile" which is the feature that instructs Marketo to hide everything and produce a custom mobile view.

Thanks,

Justin

[Robb_Barrett]

Thanks Justin Cooperman​, I figured out the problem: NEVER hit "Validate Mobile Compatibility" on your templates!

Why use free form instead of guided?  I dunno...just more used to using free form I guess. I haven't taken the time yet to learn the guided ones and I don't necessarily understand how there's a difference in just hard-coding HTML / CSS / JS. A template should be a template.

[Justin_Cooperm2]

I just responded to that thread. It's not a problem, it's a feature. If you are using a "Free Form" page and choose to "Activate a Mobile Version of your Page" you are, in essence, instructing Marketo to automatically build a mobile view of your absolute-positioned page, because the page wasn't built to be responsive.

I highly recommend you use Guided landing page templates and editor. It is more suited for what you are doing. But, I can vouch for the fact that we have tons of customer that rely on the auto-build mobile view for their templates that aren't responsive. Not everyone has technical resources to build responsive landing page templates suited for Guided mode.

Justin

[Robb_Barrett]

Indeed. I've updated the thread after learning that someone had Activated Mobile and not informed me. I've played around with the Guided pages a little bit and I don't like them as much as I like writing a Free Form template and hard-coding in tokens to the template. From there, a standard Marketer can just edit a Rich Text token and put in all sorts of lovely changes to the content without ever needing to know how to use the LP editor. Also, when we want to make major changes to our look and feel, we can write a new template referencing the same tokens, add a new LP based on those tokens into the program and we don't need to add the content in. This has made updating templates a so darn easy and it's given my standard marketing users an easier way to create programs without needing to know the email editor or the LP editor.

[Justin_Cooperm2]

You can hard code tokens into a Guided page still, so that workflow should work. The only thing you can't do is change the template that an old existing Guided page is using. If that is what you're referring to in the end of your comment, then that is the only negative for you. However, you could certainly create new Landing Pages in programs that leverage a new Guided LP Template with all the same tokens you always use. So, the end marketers are still only editing tokens.

Justin

[Robb_Barrett]

While I can see the value and benefit of Guided for many people, I've yet to be convinced that a Guided LP allows the flexibility, creativity or ease of use as an old-fashioned Free Form template with tokens coded to it. It certainly does allow for a more rigid template but, in my opinion, lacks the ability for easily customized areas and it requires the end user to be trained on how to use the guided landing page editor.  My marketing users are more comfortable with a rich text editor which allows them MS Word style editing of content areas on pages / emails without disturbing important elements. I like that I can create a template with different break points if needed and don't need to memorize a bunch of Marketo specific code that I have to add to all of my elements. Perhaps I just haven't had enough exposure, but in my opinion  a Guided page requires more work not only at the template creation level but also at the content population / update level. It also seems like any small change requires a new template.

In the end, if we're writing templates from scratch we need to code in Mobile / Desktop CSS regardless of how we choose to populate the page.