Today marks the unveiling of the fourth major iteration of the Edenwaith website. This is an important milestone for the Edenwaith website as it adopts a responsive design for both desktop and mobile web browsers and finally strips away the last remnants of ancient table-based layout. Some of the oldest pages of the previous iteration dated as far back as 2005. The website was far, far past due for a refresh.
The website has slowly evolved since the last major version by eschewing older design methods and adopting newer technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3. Revamping the entire website was a good opportunity to rethink the design, layout, and content, which included stripping some ancient content such as the tutorials and product pages for retired apps.
When I first began doing web design, it was not uncommon to see a footnote on a site recommending that the site looked best on a screen with a minimum resolution of 640x480 or 800x600. One of the biggest shifts in web development over the past nine years has been the rise of mobile web browsers on phones and tablets. A web designer can no longer assume that their content will be viewed on a large desktop monitor, but instead, will likely be viewed on a smaller display limited to several inches along the diagonal.
Adopting a responsive web design was the top priority for Edenwaith 4.0. But with all of the changes which have occurred with the rise of mobile devices, where does one start to learn how to adopt these new methodologies? It initially seems like designing for multiple screen sizes can be daunting and complicated, but it pretty much all boils down to one bit of useful CSS: @media screen and (max-width: 450px)
By being able to dynamically detect the size of the screen's viewport, it allows the page to resize and reposition its content, much in a similar manner to how Adaptive UI handles the interface for iOS. With some careful design, a site can look and work well with all sizes of screens. In learning responsive web design, I read through Ethan Marcotte's book Responsive Web Design and Interneting Is Hard's article on Responsive Design, topped with some neat CSS animation tricks from the W3Schools website.