After a month of working on it during the evenings and weekends the new blog design is live. I’m going over the site page by page, checking all the images, links, etc. but if you find any problems I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know on my Contact page.

I didn’t actually create the design myself but started with the Creative Folio template which is based on the Bootstrap responsive framework. So far, I’ve been very pleased with the template. The Bootstrap framework provides automatic resizing and layout so that visitors viewing the site on any size screen or mobile device will have a good experience. My testing on my iPad, my Android phone and my wife’s iPhone has shown that the layout adapts nicely to the different size screens. If you’re reading this on a PC you can get an idea of how this works by changing the width of your browser window.

I did find a problem with the Elastislide JavaScript plugin that was included with the template. When I tested the site on my mobile devices I discovered that you can’t scroll up or down while dragging on content that is enclosed within an Elastislide section. You can see the problem if you go to the Creative Folio Live Preview page. Scroll down to the Blog Updates section on a mobile device and then touch any of the photos there and attempt to drag up or down. It doesn’t work. I ended up replacing the Elastislide plugin with the Woothemes FlexSlider. The version in the link in the previous section is for a commercial WordPress plugin. There is also a free version which is what I used but that requires some coding.

As I mentioned in my previous post about the redesign, the Creative Folio template is not a WordPress theme. That means that a lot of work is needed to create a theme based on the template and that’s what I’ve spent the last month doing in my spare time. The good news is that the CF template is WordPress-friendly. That is to say that the design includes all the types of pages that you need in a normal WordPress theme. The template also includes other modern website features like a jQuery image slider, nice menus and a nice header and footer.

Let me know if you have any questions about WordPress themes, in general, or this redesign in particular.

screenshot of new Photo Performance design based on the Creative Folio template

I’m in the process of redesigning this blog and I wanted to include some notes here on the redesign process. I selected the Creative Folio template from {wrap}bootstrap because I like the design and because it’s built on the Bootstrap framework. Bootstrap provides a foundation for building responsive websites. “Responsive” means that the page design automatically adapts to different size devices from phones to tablets to widescreen desktop displays. You can see how that works by clicking the Creative Folio link above, then clicking the Live Preview button and changing the width of your browser window. Assuming that you’re on a desktop PC or laptop with a medium size to large screen you will be able to see the page layout changing as you increase or decrease the width of your browser window. Because so many people are accessing websites today from different devices it’s important to provide a good experience for visitors regardless of what type or size of device they are using. (more…)