Mobile website

[brightmike]

Thanks for the insight Kev!

Without boring you with my life history... on go on then I will

I was a COBOL programmer in the 80's. Move on a good few years I am a dog trainer. I taught myself HTML and created a website about 10 years ago for my dog training business. Updated a lot along the way. That website was used as a template for
my br ighto npad
website this year. It was written using tables since it was an easy concept for me to get my head around at the time. I am aware however that the other option was to use CSS but I never felt the need. It is obvious though from your comments that I need to recognise it is now 2015 and time to rewrite it using CSS to make it responsive.

I don't mind putting the effort in. I used www.w3schools.com before to teach myself HTML and basic CSS but if you can recommend an online resource that could help me?

Cheers

[kevsboredagain]

Thanks for the insight Kev!

Without boring you with my life history... on go on then I will

I was a COBOL programmer in the 80's. Move on a good few years I am a dog trainer.

I often wish I had other skills than engineering or programming as it can be a dull job at times. I remember COBOL was used in banking in the past and although I've not used it myself, I was shocked to lose a banking job due to outsourcing to India. They wanted a cheap, modern system but the core of the Indian system was written in ....COBOL!

Anyway, as someone with a programming background, I think you would find it fairly easy to make a site starting from an HTML template, which you can buy fairly cheaply. You probably already know enough HTML but just need to learn some CSS basics. I would not even attempt to create my own framework to start a site. Other developers have spent months developing them, so why invent another one full of bugs.

I cannot point to anyone internet source for CSS. I prefer Youtube videos for learning new stuff but everyone is different.

I also think you'd find Wordpress or Joomla easy to learn too.

[brightmike]

Stayed up until 2am last night watching bootstrap videos on youtube.

[Vince]

Stayed up until 2am last night watching bootstrap videos on youtube.

How did you get on? Once you get to grip with their grid system ( which IMO is easy to implement ) you should find it pretty simple to build a responsive site.

I would not even attempt to create my own framework to start a site. Other developers have spent months developing them, so why invent another one full of bugs.

FWIW, I did the old "build my own CMS in PHP" back in about 2002. Learned a lot then stumbled over Mambo ( which was to become Joomla ) and realised they'd already invented the wheel. This was waaayyy back in the day when Open Source CMSs really were in their infancy.

The sheer number of man-hours that goes into making a CMS, combined with the vastly superior understanding of security issues that helps to make a decent CMS secure should convince most people nowadays that "rolling your own" is a waste of time.

[russellt]

sorry it took a while to respond, kevsboredagain.

I guess it depends where brightmike is in conceptualising what he's trying to achieve. Sounds like he definitely has the wherewithal to understand CSS3. The question is whether to tweak the existing site, or start afresh with a template(eg bootstrap or HTML5 boilerplate).

To tweak the existing, there are loads of CSS3 tutorials on line, including www.w3schools.com. If his current website is a mix of html and inline styling, I think the first step would be to create a .css stylesheet and link it to each of his html pages. Then begin the process of extracting inline styling from his html and adding it to his stylesheet. It will be important to understand how css classes, ids and selectors work. I haven't looked at his website, so have no feel for how complex or time consuming that all might be.

Re my mobile menu, I created a class to 'hide' some of the navigation buttons on the main website when the users viewport is reduced, ie mobile device. When I have the time, I will 'unhide' some more of these buttons to populate the mobile version of the website with more details. My immediate goal was to have a mobile presence which i can now build upon.

Re 'tables and divs', yes tables are difficult for smaller viewports. I'm playing around with clearfix to understand flow, but it is not easy. I still have one table on mobile which does not display well in vertical(it is too wide), and cannot face redesigning it in divs, so I have added a message which advises users to turn their devices to horizontal to see the full table. Not ideal, I know, but it does the job.