Fixed-width-responsive vs

Question
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This is a follow on from other threads I’ve been infecting with possibly off-topic observations, and an attempt consolidate a little.

Having solved some other problems with my blog entries that I carefully put together, with all the images in the right places, etc, previewing them on a portrait phone showed up a new issue (for me). I’ve now just read through this other thread where I’ve discovered the apparent need to essentially build the website multiple times, once for each device class.

I thought the whole point of the “devices” thing was to craft for one, scale to others. So, having now read through that thread, aghast, I soldiered on and started reworking the phone portrait view of the blogs only to find that no matter what I do, I cannot get the image placement to work. It now looks like I’m going to have to break the entire blog entries into multiple text objects with interleaved images instead of one text object with overlaid images/videos with wrapping settings.

An today, with a sense of foreboding, I’ve also discovered that 15 app pages also (of course) have the same issues.

This really feels like a lot more work than I was expecting. Like, I want to move away from Wordpress, but this sort of thing makes Wordpress look attractive again. Write once, display everywhere is what I was hoping for.

Apart from this, I’m essentially finished migrating pages and the blog across and I was really happy, but this has soured things a bit.

Advice seems to be, to set it up for a minimum of “Desktop PCs” (960), PCS/Tablet (960, Auto scale), and Portrait Phone (Custom).

I had thought that I could just have one long text box, overlay the images/videos (with appropriate wrap settings), lay it out and it would work. This certainly seems to be the case for “Desktop PCs”, but the others never seem to render with the images properly.

I’ve started reworking things to have lots of text boxes, with the images between them, essentially doing away with the whole “wrap” feature since it doesn’t seem to be trustworthy (which is a great shame). But jeepers Vern, this is a lot of work…

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It’s a matter of getting use to it.

No more plug-ins, no more multi-updates, no more hacking, no more frustrations!
Once you get the hang of SItley you’ll know why you moved across to it!

Don’t forget to check out the Sitley videos on YouTube!

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Thanks for your continued support. I think it is at least in part, the enthusiasm of people like yourself, and quick and immediate support from Duncan, and the positive-ness of this community that encourage me to keep working on it. If the issues I am hitting were show stoppers, then none of those things would be so evident.

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Let me leave a working technique here.
If I am going to create more than one page with the same structure, I design the first page I made for mobile and then duplicate it and change the contents. I also create text styles carefully.
This way there is much less work to be done on the mobile side.

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Well, I’m pleased to report that using feedback from you guys, and just sticking at it, I’ve now basically got all of the site working on both portrait phone and PC.

There are still some “issues” around layout not exactly matching on the published page, or where it seems that altering the positions, and sizes of objects on one device still affect the other, but on the whole, it works.

Publishing to a test subpage on my web server was amazingly simple, and fast. And it is easy to see the difference in the performance of the new Sitely site compared to the old Wordpress site.

So thanks everyone. I’m now in a position where I can be confident to move onto the next phase of this exercise.

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