Problems with running websites today

Most of the RDM hosted websites were designed in a time when the desk top browser was the only platform one had to worry about. Since then the larger client base has completely turned around and tablet and other mobile devices now top the visitor logs. This has introduced a large number of new chalenges that seem to change on a monthly basis.

The starting point is the obvious one of screen size, complicated by the orientation question. This is additionally complicated by the simple fact that mobile devices can add their own tricks to make legacy sites usable on them. Modern responsive design allows a certain amount of variation from high resolution wide screen desktop machines down to the smallest smartphone, but even within an individual smartphone supplier there are variations in screen resolution on these smaller devices. This wikipedia page gives an idea of the range of the problem.

On top of the resolution problem, most traditional webpages are designed with mouse control in mind, with mouse over actions giving useful secondary functions such as drop down menus and the like. Tablets and smartphones only have the option of touch, so all of the mouseover actions have to be replaced by toggle actions.

Handling this is a continually evolving area, and there is not an obvious setup which can solve every problem. We had been moving towards a new framework based on the 'ink' responsive style framework, and various sites have been converted to that style theming, but it does not handle some areas well, and has fallen behind the more modern devices. So the current flavour of the month is 'bootstrap 3'. This still has it's own negatives and some legacy designs simply will not work on the base framework that BS3 requires, so new styles are necessary to get away from the often fixed with themes that have been used in the past.

A number of the RDM sites have now been moved forward to this newer format, and we now have a set of crib sheets which helps to convert existing themes to a more modern style. 101-Styling a new site has some of these, but still needs work to bring everything up to the currennt state of play.