This post may not be appropriate for this forum – if so, my apologies and please do delete it. Its technically about HTML & CSS, but not a specific problem, so I thought Get Started might be most appropriate. I am wondering if it would be okay to ask for examples of responsive design sites here? I’ve looked at a lot of showcases, but I am despairing a bit because nothing feels quite right for our site.
The first issue I have with a lot of modern, responsive designs is that they seem to presume the use of photos, often filling the initial page or a broad header. This is not an option for our site since there are no appropriate photos for the content. There are some areas of the site where photos are used in articles, but for defining the overall look of the site they’re not right.
The second issue is that a lot of the showcased designs that I find have rather short text sections. We’ve got a lot of longer articles and text-heavy content, but I really dislike the look of most news sites.
If anyone has suggestions for designs that I could look at for inspiration that don’t have the above mentioned issues, that’d be great. I really need to redesign the site, but right now I can’t envision what kind of responsive layout would actually work for it.
It’s OK to ask here - but if you don’t get much response, you might want to ask for the topic to be moved to Design and UX.
Have you looked at CSS Zen Garden? I don’t know how many of their designs are responsive - I imagine most, if not all, of the more recent ones are - but there seem to be a few there which might meet your needs. For example: http://www.csszengarden.com/214/
What niche is your site in? It might be easier for folk to make suggestions with a little more information.
Responsive web design (RWD) is not about what type of content you have, but about how the layout behaves on varying screen sizes.
If sound like your site is more text heavy, rather than image heavy. That’s actually good news, because text is naturally responsive without any css, whereas images need some css tweaks to make them responsive. What I’m saying is a site with more text and less images is generally much easier to make responsive.
To illustrate the point, take a site with no css or any java script at all, it is fully responsive. It is only the rigid css rules that (some) people are in the habit of adding that stops a site being responsive.
I’m not saying don’t use css, do use css, but avoid rigid rules, keep things fluid.
Do you have an existing site? To give an idea about the type of content or design you want.
Even if you don’t have many images on your site, you can add interest with a well-chosen colour scheme and a few tastefully done graphics. You are right in sensing that a lot of the cookie-cutter style ‘modern’ sites have a lot of images and very little text.
When you are looking for a new design for your text-heavy site, just be careful to find something that makes good use of ‘white-space’ so that it does not become cluttered and hard to read.
Thank you for your responses. I was hesitant to mention the existing site as I didn’t want it to be taken as a “please help me with this specific design” question – I know that is way beyond the forum! The current site is quite dated in many ways, in part because I’ve simply not had the time to keep pushing what I know about html & css (just enough to be dangerous, alas). It is also dated in appearance because I haven’t been able to get over my personal dislike of plain, white backgrounds for this type of site.
The site is http://www.westeros.org/ which is a fansite for A Song of Ice and Fire and, to a lesser degree, Game of Thrones. There’s a lot of different styles of content on the site, from pretty traditional news blogs to information repositories. We have some pieces of art that we have permission to use that we probably want to incorporate in some fashion, but we’re steering clear of using any photos from the TV show as the books are our primary focus.
What I have been wanting to work towards is something that acts modern (responsive, etc) and looks somewhat more modern (less textures, but perhaps not entirely untextured, no image buttons, etc), but not so modern that it is at odds with the content – medieval-inspired fantasy. I’ve looked at some sites for various games with a medieval-inspired setting, but they tend to be very image heavy and rarely have that much text to present.
I was hesitant to mention the existing site as I didn’t want it to be taken as a “please help me with this specific design” question – I know that is way beyond the forum! The current site is quite dated in many ways, in part because I’ve simply not had the time to keep pushing what I know about html & css (just enough to be dangerous, alas). It is also dated in appearance because I haven’t been able to get over my personal dislike of plain, white backgrounds for this type of site.