Back in 2009, Jason Santa Maria wrote a great article, “On Web Typography,” for A List Apart. I want to restyle this blog and fonts are one of the first things to think about.
“The system fonts we commonly use such as Georgia, Verdana, and Arial have become so ubiquitous that any associations we might have with them other than “web” are pretty much gone.”
— Jason Santa Maria
The blogging portion of this site is based on WordPress. I originally didn’t plan to blog on the site and then changed my mind. The theme I bought included a blog but, once I took a hard look at it I found the blog was extremely manual: there was no interface for managing posts, categories, tags, publishing, etc.
Enter WordPress and the exercise to retrofit this site to use it. My wounds were basically self inflicted: if I’d made an up-front decision to blog, I’d have bought one of the many WordPress themes.
Still, retrofitting WordPress into this site has been an adventure and a good learning experience. I’ve come away with a great admiration for WordPress and the WordPress community. I’m not a true coder (more of a cut, paste, and tweaker), but WordPress does everything I’d expect it a good blogging solution to do and so far I’ve been able to get it to do what I want. The basic documentation is good and, what I can’t figure out from the documentation I can find via Google.
Would I recommend WordPress to my friends? Sure would.
Responsive design allows you modify the layout, navigation, content, and appearance of a website or application based on the width of the user’s browser.
Example: This website uses responsive design — if you’re viewing it on a resizable browser (laptop/desktop), see what happens when you narrow the width of your browser. If you’re using a tablet browser or smartphone, try changing its orientation, e.g., from landscape to portrait. At the smallest screen sizes, the top navigation turns into a dropdown and multicolumn layouts become one column, all done through the magic of media queries and flexible layouts.
Some people think responsive design is the one-and-only answer to sites and applications for mobile users. Others believe it’s best to have separate websites or apps for different devices, e.g., iPad, smartphones, and laptops/desktops.
I’ll go with the classic usability answer: it depends.
This site came about because: