Hi there,
I am a web designer who has been out of the designing website game for a number of years now. I am trying to get my head around Wordpress code and responsive design but feel overwhelmed as to whether I should be using a CSS framework or not.
Also I am not sure if I should be using premium themes for wordpress design (and customising them) or build out my own core theme that I can build off (but that sounds like a ton of work!). It is in my nature to want to take the hardest way and build my own wordpress theme from scratch but the reality is that i am not sure I have the time.
I would love to hear about how you came to grips with responsive design and/or wordpress dev.
cheers.
For responsive design and frameworks, these are worth a look:
Adobe’s Edge Reflow:
html.adobe.com/edge/reflow/
If you’ve ever used conditional css for IE browsers, then responsive design is roughly equivalent to that, except the conditions relate to screen size instead of browser, and are called Media Queries. I’m sure there’s more to it, but that’s in layman’s terms.
Foundation:
http://foundation.zurb.com
If you want to do your own design for Wordpress, look for the Starkers theme, which is a bare bones theme that you can style fairly easily to match and blend in to an existing site.
If you are simply interested in building responsive WordPress themes, you can definitely use a premium framework for that. Building a child theme for a framework will be much less work for you (just CSS really). And if the framework is responsive already, there’s not much left to do.
Take a look at the Volatyl Framework for WordPress. It’s fully responsive, ready to support child themes, and even has child theme head starts for different types of website structures.
Thanks for your great replies. I will look into all of that.