Mobile and Responsive Design

Responsive Mobile Website Templates

Responsive templates are a popular approach in the web design industry, because not every CMS can provide a dedicated mobile template option. Responsive design means that the template has been specially crafted to change shape in different browser widths. Responsive templates can be difficult for users to edit themselves, as each element needs to be especially crafted. 

For example, menus might be condensed, or relocated off page, and pulled in when needed. Responsive websites tend to be slower to download on mobile devices, as the mobile device needs to download all the styles/themes that are used in the desktop version, even if not used in the mobile version. Some web designers focus on making great looking templates, but they forget about these download speed issues. 

If your website is tourist oriented, your customers may be out and about on the edges of mobile phone coverage, and they might have trouble downloading all the additional JavaScript and CSS libraries that are not required for the mobile experience. Responsive templates are often slow to download, but we have been working hard to make our new responsive templates as fast as they can be, and our responsive templates will render about 3 times faster than the average WordPress theme. Our responsive websites can be customised with different colours, fonts, and images.  

Dedicated Mobile Website Templates

A dedicated mobile website template is the traditional way we have provided backward compatibility for all our desktop websites to offer their customers a mobile experience. The mobile template uses the same navigational sitemap, and same content as your desktop website. However, we trimmed off all the unnecessary clutter to ensure your customers could quickly get to the information they want. For example, navigate to your contact details, view a map link, or view your products and make a purchase easily on their small screens. Over time we have added banners, logos and auto matched the colours to your desktop template. With fine tuning to your dedicated mobile template design, your customers will have an awesome experience, as this method is the fastest option for customers using slow rural mobile connections. 

Completely Separate Mobile Websites

Having a whole website crafted just for mobile might give a really good mobile experience at first, but more often than not, the webmaster forgets to maintain it (or cannot maintain it) , and the information become out of sync in each website. If you are running an online shopping site, you really need to have both your mobile experience and your desktop experience powered by the same shopping cart engine. We advise our customers not to use this approach. 

How to Convert Your Existing Website to A Responsive Template

We have lots of different responsive templates that you can choose from. We are updating more all the time. When you change to a responsive template, it will update both your desktop and mobile layouts. 

1. In the CMS, go to the DESIGN tab
2. Select CHANGE THEME
3. Look through all the themes, and take note of the RESPONSIVE or MOBILE button. This button allows you to preview the theme in either mode. Only the themes with RESPONSIVE button are responsive templates. 
4. SELECT a theme to continue. 
5. Untick the boxes for changing banner, logo, background and colours, if you want to keep your existing brand elements the same. 
6. Tick the box to backup your old design settings, just in case something goes wrong. 
7. Save the theme change.
8. Sometimes when you preview your website after a theme change, it might not look right, due to browser caching settings. You may need to PUBLISH and clear your browser cache, to see your website looking right. 
9. Sometimes you may need to reapply your colour settings for menus etc, as some templates provide the default colours, and others don't, or perhaps your colour combinations are not immediately compatible with the template, and may need some fine adjusting.  

How to Select A New Dedicated Mobile Template

We have 8 different dedicated mobile templates, but each will use the colours and font from your desktop theme. 

1. In the CMS, go to the DESIGN tab
2. Select MOBILE TEMPLATES
3. click SELECT A NEW MOBILE THEME
4. Look through all the themes, and take note of the RESPONSIVE or MOBILE button. This button allows you to preview the theme in either mode. Only the themes with RESPONSIVE button are responsive templates. 
5. SELECT a theme to continue. 
6. Untick the boxes for changing banner, logo, background and colours, if you want to keep your existing brand elements the same. 
7. Tick the box to backup your old design settings, just in case something goes wrong. 
8. Save the theme change.
9. Sometimes when you preview your website after a theme change, it might not look right, due to browser caching settings. You may need to PUBLISH and clear your browser cache, to see your website looking right. 
10. Sometimes you may need to reapply your colour settings for menus etc, as some templates provide the default colours, and others don't, or perhaps your colour combinations are not immediately compatible with the template, and may need some fine adjusting.  

Tweaking Your CSS To Be Mobile Responsive

If you are technically minded, you might like to just hack your existing template into CSS responsive mode. 

Look for lines in your stylesheet with the biggest dimensions of either 600px, 750px, or 900px: 

#container { width: 750px; margin: 0 auto; }

And change them to be like this, where it fulls 90% of the screen width up to a max of 960.

#container { width: 90%; max-width: 960px;  margin: 0 auto; }

Then look for columns, and change their widths or margins from fixed widths, to % widths, but only apply those widths when the screen width supports it. When the screen width is less 600px, the columns will become stacked in the full width of the browser. 

@media (min-width: 600px) {   .leftColumn {  width: 20%; float: left; }