technobabble

Responsive Web Design is based on the idea that a website design and layout should "respond" to the device it's being viewed on. This is usually accomplished by using techniques, such as:

• Adapting the layout to suit different screen sizes, from phones to tablets to laptops to widescreen desktops
• Resizing images to suit the screen resolution/size
• Serving up smaller, lower-bandwidth images to mobile devices
• Simplifying page elements for mobile
• Providing only essential elements on smaller screens
• Progressively enhancing elements for larger screens

Responsive Design is all the rage these days and for good reason: Designing a web site for every possible device (an "Adaptive" design) very quickly becomes an exercise in futility as more and more devices with varying display sizes are introduced seemingly every day. You could, of course, have a separate Mobile web site in addition to your "normal" one but keeping the content on both sites in synch is difficult and more likely impossible. Generally speaking, unless you need some specific functionality for your site that is only provided by a mobile device, a responsive design is usually more efficient and easier to maintain.

This site will be undergoing a visual redesign. I want to achive a lighter, more minimalistic look. The color scheme is similar to my Coolness and Liquid Coolness Drupal themes. This is a work in progress, so check back often to see it happen.

When creating a contributed theme or sub-theme that will very likely be used on many different web sites, it can be useful to provide a special stylesheet for overrides and customizations to avoid making any changes to the theme's core stylesheets. This type of stylesheet is often called local.css but any convenient name can be used. In it are placed overrides to any core styles and customizations for the output of any modules that may be required for a specific site. The main benefit of this is that when a new version of the theme is released, any web site using it can upgrade the files without overwriting any changes that might have been made to core stylesheets if this special stylesheet hadn't been provided. A further benefit is that this stylesheet will load after the core stylesheets, making it easier to override them.