Responsiveness - best theme?

I have just seen a friends site built using Squarespace and the quality of the responsiveness is far superior to mine - I am using the Qube theme. Are any themes better than others in this respect? As a photographer I need my portfolio to display perfectly across all platforms so this is very important to me. Any suggestions gratefully received!

If it’s a photography site you’ll presumably have some nice images to do the visual work for you so I’d go for a really clean, sparse theme. Have a look at:

http://michaeldaviddesign.com/
www.themeflood.com
http://bltthemes.com/

Rob

Especially for a photographer website I would also have a look at Lucas’ themes at http://archetypon.net and at Nick Cates’ “Iris” theme: https://nickcatesdesign.com/preview/rapidweaver/iris

@RapidBase Those are good calls as well!

Thank you everyone, I will look into those suggestions. Does anyone know if the joe Workman Impact stack will be suitable?

Thanks

Bruce

A great responsive theme which allows you to design your site the way you want it is Joe Workman’s Foundation theme. It is a stack based theme, meaning all pages will have to be stack pages. I would also highly suggest any Elixirgraphics theme, they are excellent too.

I believe there is no clear recommendation. It’s the same kind of question like ‘what ist the best car?’ In this case I would ask you ‘how would you like to use the car? for racing, transportation or as a status symbol?’

A good theme needs the balance between design and function. Most of the themes for RW are well balanced. In my eyes the best way to find YOUR theme is to check first for the function you need (for example: photography). If you search for this kind of function, you will find a lot of themes, maybe one that you like.

If not, there are themes like Foundation, FreeStackResponsive and Bootstrap/snap that allow you to design your own theme with stacks. But to do that, you need a lot more time and of course some knowing about design, otherwise it looks ugly. FreeStackResponsive was the first one that I used for a long, long time and it is still great. At the moment I prefer Foundation for most of my new sites, because it has some more options. In combination with the free BigWhiteDuck Stacks ( I have to make a BIG donation for this amazing Stacks) and other Joe Workman Stacks, it is in my eyes the best solution to build unique, responsive sites with RW at the moment.

Thank you, I was unaware of Big White Duck and will look into that. As a photographer I want clean design and responsive image handling. My good friend http://www.markluscombewhyte.com has what I consider to be an almost perfect site but that of course is built with Squarespace and having invested quite a bit in RW ( both money and time/knowledge) over the years I am reluctant to jump ship just yet.

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@Boswell - the site looks amazing. You can build a site like this easy with Foundation. It’s clean, simple, minimalistic design. If you like to use a amazing slideshow you could use the Impact Stack for that. A great option for photographers is the Impact Stack in combination with TotalCMS. So it’s very simple to keep your site alway up to date. I hope the Joe Workmann will add a Blog asap. At the moment I use Armadillo in combination with TotalCMS for that.

If you like Mark’s photo site, have a look at Paramount (http://michaeldaviddesign.com/themes/paramount/). It’s got a similar navigation and that nice ‘empty’ feel.

@WDA is right about Foundation and Freestack but they’re more work than using a conventional theme where all the styling has been done for you.

Rob

I’ve recently bought Impact and was thinking of incorporating that into the update as some people find my current navigation confusing. http://www.bhphoto.biz

I do quite like Paramount but it doesn’t seem to be responsive in the way that it treats the images once the slideshow is active. I can see that getting the right combination of themes and stacks is the issue for me - and I’m a photographer - never wanted to be a website designer :wink:

In what way aren’t the images responsive? They look OK to me at different sizes.

Rob

If you own Foundation and Impact, that this is your solution. If you have a mix of horizontal and portrait pictures, a top bar menu is a problem. A square container for your slideshow grantees that horizontal and portrait pictures get the same attention. For your amazing panoramas you can easy change the layout to a horizontal layout.
BTW I always recommend not to simple clone a layout. As a photographer you know that is not fair to the designer who spend a lot of time to create this. In this case your unique photography would be present in a design copy, that would make your work less unique for others…

I believe that in addition to Foundation and Impact I would also have to purchase the starter pack to access the different containers/menu bars etc - is that correct?

Thank you
Bruce

Yes, to use the Foundation theme without any hand coding, you would at least need to purchase the starter pack. Remember, you can use any other stacks in Foundation.