Responsive Themes - Who's making 'em?

Neil Planchon

I am hearing about "responsive" themes. This mean they are iOS friendly - right?

Who all is making these? And what experience are folks having with them?

What are your favorites?

Cheers
Neil

Aaron Marquez

Hello Neil,
Pretty much all of the major theme developers are making responsive themes.

ElixirGraphics: Bamboo, Mobi
NCD Themes: Mark 1, Carbon
seyDesign: Alltr, CRE4MY, EHVolver and a few more.
BLT Themes: Polyphonic, Overture, and Gallant
Henk Vrieselaar: INFINITE
Rapid Ideas: EON
ThemeFlood: Flood

There are probably a few I missed, but those are some to get you started. Pretty much all the themes mentioned good experienced were had, just depends on what you want and what you are looking for in a theme. The Carbon theme from NCD and the Flood theme from ThemeFlood are probably some of the more popular ones.

"urmeli"

Here you can find an overview of responsive RapidWeaver-themes (German site):

"responsive" Vorlagen für RapidWeaver-Projekte

Will Woodgate

There's a good writeup of what responsive web design is here on the Smashing Magazine website: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/12/guidelines-for-responsive-web-design/

I'm in the process of making my RapidWeaver themes responsive, although it will be optional alongside existing theme settings. So those who do not require responsive layouts won't be forced into a corner. Best of both worlds so to speak

mtmfx

Be careful when going the responsive route. I made the decision to go responsive and purchased many responsive themes and all of the responsive stacks that were available which was a very expensive upgrade to say the least. I believed it would be easier to do a responsive website that would look good on all devices. The stacks and themes I purchased are very good and I am not complaining about them. But I think it might be too early to go responsive and here is why.Your existing stack collection will not act responsive and will break your design. For example your trusty slider or tab stack will act weird and make your design look bad. So your choice is to not use the stacks you love so much, or you can replace all your stacks with responsive ones. The problem is that there are not enough responsive stacks available at this time. Then there is another issue with the design concept. You will find when designing responsive that you can not design like you used to. You will be basically designing the website in small boxes that sit in responsive columns. That is a change when dealing with photos and graphics that take up the full width of the page. So the approach is completely different and this will be frustrating and time consuming. I have been going through this for the last 3 weeks and I am not happy with the results. I could have made a better looking site in a third of the time if I did not have these challenges. So until the day comes when the rapidweaver market is full of responsive options I am going to go non-responsive and use Mobilze. I like the responsive concept but I will wait. You should check out Nimblehost and their Mobilize bundle. I am just trying to save anyone from going through what I went through. I hope this post can spark the conversation needed on this topic.

Thanks,

Colorwave

Great points, @mtmfx. I think that with the bandwagon rolling so fast, it is sometimes good to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. You haven't even mentioned that many or most of the responsive solutions don't work well with even IE8, let alone 7, so a careful look at your client's demographics is important.

Some site styles will work very well with flexible underpinnings, and some, more tightly designed ones, just won't adapt well. I think a lot of it boils down to the type of content being presented, and the visual style.

Even though there are one size fits all themes, there aren't one size fits all approaches. A standalone mobile theme is quite likely a safer and simpler approach, IMO, although I don't know that I will feel the same way a year from now.

mtmfx

I didn't know about the IE issues. This reminds me of when quadraphonic sound came out in recording studios in the 70's. My father owned a major L.A. studio and went quad but the consumer didn't and it cost him a lot. 20 years later surround sound was the ticket. Beta, VHS you know the story.

Peace,

yuZool

Great points everyone.

I'll be making some responsive themes soon so you can add me to the list when I do but it really depends on the project. Not all themes or projects suit responsive so Will's idea to let you switch it off is a good one. Depends a lot on the userbase / traffic.

@colorwave - yes I've done a lot of separate mobile sites and these have their benefits. It's simpler, quicker to deploy and often cheaper for the client. The only issues with that means they now have two sites to update with new information rather than just the one.

At this time, responsive design is just one solution to the growing rate of devices connecting to the internet.

@mtmfx - totally understand this and your frustrations. Responsive does need a new and fresh approach to planning a site. A lot of people refer to this as "Mobile First" - design for mobile first and if it looks and functions well on there, it will expand and look great on the bigger devices.

Best of luck all with your projects

Patrick Houlihan

Both Aaron's post above and urmeli's link include Flood. Flood is the only responsive theme I have in which the responsive features work well in IE 7 and 8.

Although not mentioned above, Themeflood's Black & White and Media themes are also responsive:

themeflood.com/media/

themeflood.com/blackandwhite/

I don't have Black & White or Media, but based on some work I've done with Flood this past week, I plan on buying both. I've viewed Will's demo pages in IE 7 & 8, and both themes seem to work as well as Flood does.

mtmfx

It would be nice if the theme developers would make it an option to turn off responsive and other add ons. If a theme could also have a bare bones version at a lower price that would be nice. I would rather have a ton of options to upgrade the look of the theme and less of the bells and whistles. One theme I purchased for $30 did not give me the option to change the background color. Every time I asked the developer for a way to change something it was "not recommended". It seemed like my design options were so limited with the theme that I didn't want to use it. In the future I think I will be leaning towards themes like Bootsnap, Flood and Freestack. Here is an idea for someone out there or Realmac, create an app called "Theme Maker" and let a novice user create the theme of their dreams. I know that there are products to update a theme but I don't think there is one to create a theme. Sorry for going off topic. Just my thoughts....

Patrick Houlihan

In addition to Themeflood, seyDesign's themes give you the option of not using responsive functions.

Swipedigital

Im in the final stages of completing my first ever theme for Rapid Weaver! Just tagging up the Syntax and Plist as I speak for this.

its about 85% complete! Its gonna be fully responsive too with lots of extra options. With responsive full screen video capabilities and custom font faces too! Get a taste of this at

http://www.mcr-digital.com

My theme is going to be customisable version of this website that I designed and created for my girlfriend! Hope you all like it and download it when its ready!

Cheers!

AndyC

Will Woodgate

Generally speaking, making elements responsive in web pages is not too difficult to do, and maintaining compatibility with Internet Explorer has not posed any problems for me personally. If anything, responsive gives that little bit more tolerance and flexibility in page designs, and I found Internet Explorer adapts very well to responsive behaviour. That's why I thought the time was right to start introducing responsive features into my own themes and stacks. My assumption is that those developers who don't support IE7 / IE8 would have the same policy in place anyway, responsive or not.

However I am acutely aware that responsive is not for everyone. I've taken time to consult with people (a group of us got together on Skype at the end of last year) and get feedback from real RapidWeaver users about what they want and what direction they see things going in. The consensus was that while responsive is nice to have, there are situations when it can upset the balance between page functionality and appearance. So therefore I've always ensured responsive behaviour is an optional setting in my products, and I've purposefully avoided forcing people into a corner. New products to the market ultimately have the ability to set benchmarks in the first instance, whereas updates have to be done a bit more carefully to avoid upsetting the existing user base.

I believe we are very much at a transitional stage between fixed-width pages and fully responsive pages. Similar in some respects to the days (years) when we slowly switched from HTML tables to CSS layouts. Therefore the term 'responsive' is very much open to debate at this early stage (which I definitely think should be encouraged) and different people will always have different ideas of what responsive is. Indeed I have found some people have complained bitterly about my own themes and stacks for being too responsive for their liking, not working like other themes or doing things they did not expect. Web design is very much an art form, and therefore is open to personal opinion.

Fortunately RapidWeaver users have a great (and ever growing) choice of addons to choose from - other publishing platforms like Sandvov seriously lack the same diversity of addons. Some addons always will be better suited to some tasks than others. Bottom line, some addons are better than others. And in many respects, the criteria to which a website is built to will govern the best tools for the job. The last couple of project proposals I've seen across my desk have made no mention whatsoever of responsive behaviour, but strangely IE6 compatibility still gets a footnote!

Aaron Marquez

The themeflood themes are awesome.

mtmfx

Well said Will. I think my biggest problem is not being able to use certain stacks with the responsive themes. I don't want to wait for each stack to be updated or rebuilt. I do like your responsive themes and bootstrap implementation.

Tappo

Personally, I find myself frustrated when I see a "responsive" theme on IOS: I don't see a theme, but only a list of contents. It seems to me to be back in the days of the WAP.
At the moment, on an iPhone, a 960px website has definitely a better impact than a "responsive" one.
New smartphone browsers and new screen resolutions, allow us to see and browse easily better websites without any special artifice.
It's only have to tap twice with your finger ...

@WillWoodgate your themes, which I find very beautiful and customizable, totally lose their effectiveness and beauty when viewed as "responsive" on an iPhone. That 's why I like the fact that the "responsivity" is just an option.

mitchellm

Tappo: probably Will's themes do lose a bit when made responsive. Test it out for yourself. Easy to switch back and forth between responsive and non-responsive in his themes. This is a fantastic option Will offers: this easy back and forth. (Okay, there are other fantastic options also in his themes, but this is certainly one of them!)

mars

@mtmfx

I agree with you. We're not waiting for designers but developers, we will do the look & feel. Just wait for Blueball design, they will surprise us with a Freestack Response Wave, soon!

They understand us, also Will