Ethan Marcotte coined the term Responsive Web Design and soon after wrote an amazing book on the topic. A Book Apart’s Responsive Web Design is the perfect stepping stone to getting started coding and designing responsive websites. For those of you who may not know what I’m talking about, Responsive Websites are websites that adapt to their surroundings rather than being substituted for alternatives.
Instead of multiple versions of websites for mobile devices, tablets, projectors, and more; we create one website that responds to the dimensions of the screen or the device it’s been loaded on to.
There are endless benefits to this form of development but one that I’ve been experimenting with and have had huge success with is marrying these sites with Facebook fan pages.
I have yet to see anyone else doing this, so consider this a gift from me to you.
Facebook opened the doors to dynamic Facebook fan pages once they allowed for the creation of iframe fan page tab apps. Since you can iframe in any site that is in compliance with Facebook terms, nothing is stopping you from framing in WordPress powered sites. This immediately empowers your users to control the content of their facebook fan page without any extra work.
I started creating WordPress Powered Facebook Tab Apps a while back but recently I’ve taken it to another level. Instead of designing a custom WordPress theme or page for use in a Facebook tab I’ve been implementing Responsive Designs, which allows you to continue your website branding and remain consistent without having to design something custom.
Below are two of my most recent examples. The first is a campaign that the team at Neal Advertising has been hard at work for Herb Chambers. We produced an awesome commercial for a campaign called We’ve Got What You Need. The website is responsive and because of that it works on all mobile devices, tablets, and beautifully fits right into the Facebook tab dimensions.
The second implementation of this tactic is for my personal “After Gastric Bypass” [link: fan page. I wanted to offer my users the ability to upload their stories but what I’ve found is that traffic on the fan page is far greater than the site. So I iframed in a WordPress powered site with a Responsive Theme allowing for form submissions right from Facebook.
I have had some great success with this and I hope you can do the same. Please feel free to get in touch with me via comments below or twitter so we can chat more about this or I can answer any questions you might have.
