Responsive: Mobile First
We have all read that all over the place. When you are creating a website and want to make sure that it works well on mobile platforms, then you should design for that platform first. I thought it was nothing and said to myself, “self, we can do responsive last“. And so I did.
And failed.
Sure, the site worked on mobile and tablets, but it wasn’t quite right. Back to the drawing board I went, rebuilding the grid and starting almost from scratch.
Mobile first.
And you know what, it worked much better! If you are looking at this on a mobile device, trust me when I tell you that it is better than my first attempt. There are still some tweaks to follow to dial it in just a little bit more, especially on the gallery pages. I’ll be writing it up for you to read all about shortly. But for now, kick the tires and let me know if you have any issues.
A few details? Ok.
- Custom Post type for a gallery
- Custom header, background and menus (just like the stock WP themes)
- Fully responsive
- A few shortcodes for widget styling and other things
More to follow in the next week!
A few more for the Portfolio
A few more for the portfolio page I’m happy to announce. 1 is the 2nd site using the theme you are seeing right now, and that’s over at White Roof Radio. I’m still doing tweaks to the overall layout and operation of this theme, but I think I’m about 95% of the way to it being bullet-proof.
Another addition is Poggioaz.com. It’s an Italian restaurant in Scottsdale, AZ and I used another premium theme for them. This time from themeforest.net. For a change, this one came with documentation. Sure, it was mostly wrong, but at least it gave me a place to start so I could get the site properly configured for the client. It’s also running on a GoDaddy server (not for my lack of trying to get them to move), so I had to do a few more tricks to improve the overall performance of the site. It’s not perfect, but I’m getting close.
Next up will be an update to dbmini.us before I go back and fine tune this layout.
The Sunday Post #104: Time for a Change
This one has been more than a long time coming. With Donburnside.com running a theme that I created back in 2008, it was getting a little long in tooth. So, I present to you, the fine readers of DonBurnside.com, db.com v3.0 (rev 0).
A New Layout
This is one that I have been wanting to do for quite some time, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. After I moved to Arizona, I got the opportunity to redesign the website for work and decided that this would be quite a bit like that. You know me, like to work with known good.
Which is exactly what I did!
Take a few minutes to look around. Somethings are still a little wonky, but I’ll be getting those taken care of in short order. The short list includes cleaning up the CSS, making comments look better and returning the sidebar on the blog to it’s former, kick-ass, glory. I have also updated my Portfolio if you would like to get more information about the sites that I have done.
Time for some changes
As I’m wont to do, every few years I like to change things up a bit. That means a brand new donburnside.com can’t be far behind!
Prompted mostly by new fascination with grid-based layouts, the new donburnside.com (that is already under development) will be using this. You might have seen a couple of other sites I’ve recently done using this, and I really like it.
I haven’t had the time to write of late. Which works out because I haven’t really had anything to write about. I haven’t done a video recently either but that’s more technical than anything else.
When I say I haven’t been writing, that’s not entirely true. I’ve been posting to the blog for work, I have a few posts over at dbmini that are pretty fresh plus some podcasts that are also of the newish variety. Just nothing for you guys here.
Working on changing that too. I. Have a plan.
So, the new site. I’m going to skip the rainbows and unicorn tears this time around and go more corporate I think. dark, muted colors, some flashy javascript and only the finest of my photos. I like to think I’m a pro, time to turn this site into exactly that. Stay tuned!
Hacked? Me?
For those of you that might have visited donburnside.com yesterday, you might have noticed a little something different. Different in as much as a redirect to some website that wasn’t english. Nothing bad as far as I could tell, just not here.
Turns out, this was completely avoidable and has been corrected. You see, I never bothered to stop using the default ‘admin’ user. My password was brute forced and the main index.php file was over written, and my themes index.php file was blanked out. Good thing I had backups.
So, let this be a lesson to you. Don’t use WordPress with the admin username. While I’m a little late to this party, better late than never.
