Is Responsive for me?

[lnangel]

Not sure exactly how to ask this...I am looking to layout a site that consists of alot of aligned images -- often times, I am using (as an example), three boxes with products within them in a row. They look beautiful on the larger screens, but due to the responsiveness of the theme, look odd on smaller resolutions (they only fit two boxes across, with one underneath...and of course, they stack on mobile phones). I think my biggest concern is with the mobile user (ironic that I say that--I know--since more and more browsers are using mobile phone) -- it just doesn't make sense for all of my images to stack.

If I get a non-responsive theme, I presume that will take care of the problem (users will just have to scroll, right)? I am SO not a coder so if that's the fix, I'm tempted to go down that route. I know there's a way to recode what I've done in the past using %s and stuff to get this code to work, but I just don't have the knowledge.

 

 

[nickthegeek]

You can disable responsive design, but before you do anything, I'd recommend reading up on responsive design to make sure you really want to disable it. There are a LOT of good reasons why responsive design is the way of the future.This is a great article totally independent of all Copyblogger services
http://dallasbass.com/5-reasons-why-responsive-design-is-absolutely-worth-it/

I personally think you should take a step back and look at your design. Mobile browsing is predicted to overtake desktop browsing next year. Ask yourself if the side by side images is really accessible on a mobile device. Can the text be clearly read when view like that or will the device user have to zoom in then scroll left to right? I don't know what you have but I'm guessing that the answer is no. It probably should be designed for your mobile users, then spread out for the desktop users. Otherwise you are potentially providing a subpar experience for a very large chunk of your users. Most developers I know wouldn't design HTML5/CSS3 without fallbacks for older browsers. The mobile market is already significantly larger than the number of users still on IE6, 7, and 8. I'm just sayin.

If you are sure you wish to disable responsive design, delete the responsive section from the style.css file. This is near the bottom and labeled responsive. Most of the code will be indented so it should be very easy to identify. You also need to remove the viewport meta from the functions.php file. It will resemble this code

/** Add Viewport meta tag for mobile browsers */
add_action( 'genesis_meta', 'child_add_viewport_meta_tag' );
function child_add_viewport_meta_tag() {
echo '';
}

[robthecomputerguy]

I'd like to chime in and say that I have trying to develop a simple internal website for a small company for the past 2 months, and I have tried several different themes from different companies.  At the company, most of management will mostly view the website on a phone, many others, iPad.  Very few desktop users, but when management sits down at their computer, I can't have it be all wacky.

Without question, the quality of the work that has been put into responsive StudioPress themes are not just better, but they are miles ahead of the quality of the themes available by other major outlets.  For example, WooThemes gets it all wrong: they take your navigation menu and put one single item per line in the condensed layout.  So on a mobile phone, the "above the fold" area is ALL MENU!  But it looks like that's the entry page so you think you have to choose something -- the visitor would have no idea to scroll down to get anything on page 1.  And for every other reason I could think of, it's just awful.

I don't disagree with what Nick's saying but if I may say that we need to adjust our approach and reorganize our sites to make sure they look correct on the most popular devices.  So if that 3-across block doesn't look right on a tablet, that's a problem you have to solve. Maybe go to 4 across so the tablet display is symmetrical (if that's indeed what you wanted.)  If I'm not mistaken, Google Analytics will tell you what browser your visitors are using so if you find out that 90% of your visitors are using a desktop, then you'd be able to make an informed decision about organizing the layout for a particular audience.  I believe most websites cater to a tablet audience so we have passed a tipping point where this can no longer be ignored.  In one example, Staples automatically navigates you to an alternate site styled to work on a tablet - which is the most work possible, but I think a majority of websites have some stopgap in place to make their websites look as dreamy on a tablet as they do on the desktop.

I've done 2 sites within the past month and the responsive layouts provided by StudioPress have been indisputably superior to the point where I could not justify using any other theme.

It sounds like a burden to test and keep up with this, but soooo much less so with the SP theme.

And Nick, don't give it up so quickly! 🙂

[lnangel]

Well thank you -- I certainly agree with all points here. What I want to do (you are right, Rob) is use these boxes I talked about--and they look fine as long as they are in even numbers on both smaller resolutions, wider, as well as tablet. The problem is the inevitable stacking on the phones.

But, from Google Analytics, I can easily see that for another one of my sites, about 50% of traffic comes from the phone (hence what spurred this question) so I know optimizing for mobile is important, no matter how annoying it is from a design perspective.

So, I'm going to keep the responsive design and hope for the best. Try to tweak what I can to make it "make sense" on as many devices as possible. If it looks a little "not ideal" on one, I'll live with it. Hopefully as responsive layouts become more and more popular, people will learn that styling can look a bit different on phones vs. websites.

[IndianIsland]

I use Google Analytics to manage 13 sites 9 of them Ecommerce. 47% of the visitors are coming from mobile devices.  That's compared to 1% two years ago. There's a clue there.

I bought into  Studiopress in part because of the work that went into responsive design.

Now if they  could just work this forum hiccup out I may be content here again

 

[Author]

Posts