I’ve been using WordPress since at least 2009. It was my tool of choice for many company websites (some of them no longer around, one of them still there, like: https://web-solutions.eu/). Mainly because it was kind of a standard on the market. In between I’ve also been playing with a nice and neat French CMS called spip. Spip was excellent with it’s multi-language support back then.
Times have changed, though I am still being occasionally called in to help on WordPress. Especially to those of my friends who made a massive mistake of installing multiple plugins and then got baited into clicking ‘update WordPress’. I might say I did a massive amount of manual DB migrations :).
This weekend though, I was helping my wife to go live with her site. I decided on WordPress again. A ready to use template and the site is ready to go in about 2 days. Note there was a lot of things I had to rip out of the template, though managed to keep the site on vanilla WordPress. A BIG WIN!
You can find the site on https://katefitdesign.com/. Here is how it looks at the moment:
I also learned two interesting things.
First, I had a requirement for the site to open correctly on mobile devices. As a massive fan of more just-text-based internet it’s usually not a massive challenge for me. Albeit the world works differently for designers :). Also for motion artists / designers. And my wife.
This is how I have discovered a wonderful CSS feature called @media only screen. You can put something like below into your css and most of the things will scale automatically (assuming your website is simple enough).
@media only screen and (min-device-width: 320px) and (max-device-width: 680px)
.site-main {
width: 320px;
}Neat! Being mostly a backend engineer I never cared much about the display. Now I can shout TIL!
Secondly, I needed to verify this. And chrome came to my rescue. It has a fantastic emulation tool. See below:
Now the selection of mobile devices is excellent! I have also verified this on all the home mobiles and tablets. Worked like a charm.
If you are thinking on whether you really like to play with FE code and build your site yourself, I’d say don’t. Just use things that just-work. They might be boring tech, but save you sooo much time!
