The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article this morning…
Apple Tests Larger Screens for iPhones, iPads
It got me to thinking about responsive design, specifically the matter of using breakpoints vs. fluid layouts. Continue reading
Re-styling for responsive design is a ton of re-work. It’s much easier to build a website correctly the first time! I’ve still got about a day and a half of css tweaking ahead of me, but here are a few concrete tips for avoiding the pain I am experiencing…
1) Whenever possible, style repeatable components (e.g., menus and block views) so they’ll look good as they adapt to your responsive breakpoints.
Here is a sidebar component that is not very flexible. I will have to write and test separate css code for each breakpoint to make it work with my responsive layout…
I’m excited to see this white paper on PCI compliance published today. This couldn’t be better timing for me, as I plan to spend the next few days on final shopping cart QA and security checks for the gench site.
It looks like most of the recommendations are pretty straightforward, but the big take-away is that I have to make sure the shared hosting service for the new gench e-commerce site is PCI DSS compliant. Something tells me earthlink probably isn’t compliant (their support guy once asked me for my password!!!).
My client is reluctant to move the gench site to another hosting provider, but we may have to if we want to avoid the huge fines and headaches non-compliance could entail.
Here’s a lesson on how NOT to design a responsive website.
Don’t wait until the end of the project to think about it. Thinking about how your site will look and behave on mobile devices should be the first step in planning and designing a site. It should continue to be forefront in your mind during every layout and feature decision, especially anything having to do with menus and navigation.
When I started the gench site, I knew I wanted it to be responsive, so I did my homework and based the genchstyle theme on Omega. This was a good move, but the last time in the project that I focused on responsiveness. As I built and styled the site, I told myself “I’ll tweak the design for mobile devices once I get the ‘basic’ site built.” BIG mistake! Continue reading
A few people have asked me what I think of Lullabot’s DrupalizeMe video tutorial series.
I signed up for it about a month ago and the bottom line is at $45 per month ($35 if you sign up for a year), it’s a really good value. I haven’t tried the other for-fee services out there so I don’t really have any basis for comparison. I just know these tutorials have helped me tremendously. Continue reading
Is it just me or is it the case with Drupal that the things that seem like they ought to be really hard, end up being super easy, and that, conversely, things you figure will be a slam dunk end up taking a week to figure out?
Case in point: I just spent three days I will never get back setting up two simple shipping rates for the gench site. I had smugly budgeted about 15 minutes for this task. It’s shipping – not rocket science – right?
I did finally figure it out, but it turned out there was one major barrier to overcome: my innate stupidity. Continue reading
Unbelievably, my first Drupal website is nearing completion and approaching launch.
“Nearing completion” rightfully belongs couched in quotes as I’ve been daily uttering “today is the day I finish the website” — for the past 3 weeks!
I’ve been burning the midnight oil every day and night, but the goal-post keeps moving as I realize how many of those non-glamorous but essential tasks remain to be done.
banoodle land 