Layout / Use of Grid System - html

Hi Im currently creating a Website (who isn't?). My Website Design Looks like this:
Desktop Version:
Mobile Version:
(Sorry for the Big Images)
As you can see, ist not much changing.
Sidebar and the Global Nav are disabled in the Mobile Version (MenĂ¼ via o/Off Canvas)
The main Content Layout Changes.
The Layout in the Content divs Changes too. (Use nested Colums fot that in the Grid System?)
My Question is: Should I use a Grid System? If Yes: Should I just use it for the Orange Content Area or for the hole Website?
Added: The Site should is Full with!

As mmgross said, you're asking a pretty broad question that comes down to taste and experience in design.
There are a number of tools and frameworks that give you access to an already defined grid system; Bootstrap is probably the best known but Foundation CSS is becoming very popular and is lighter weight. If you're not planning to do much intricate styling and just want a preexisting grid, my personal choice is Skeleton - it's very lightweight but adds the grid/responsiveness you're [probably] looking for.
This brings up the other main point: how experienced are you using HTML/CSS? One of the big benefits of using a grid is the responsiveness that comes from them without writing a number of media queries. Still, you'll have to at least write one media query to detect if mobile, so if you're comfortable with position in CSS then it might be best just to pass over grids and write it all yourself (looking at your layout, that's what I'd probably do).
It's always a trade off between time it takes to do the task and time it takes to learn something new, so keep in mind that the learning curve for some of the frameworks might be steeper than you think. Then again, if you're experienced with using them, it will probably be easier to stick with what you know than play around with the raw CSS.
Hope that helped!

Related

Responsive application with vanilla css

I'm trying to build an app that looks great on all devices but I'm having an issue with the responsiveness, actually I have a dought for what should I do. so here is what I'm thinking about:
1- If I build the app using the device toolbar which means I start with a media querie of 320px up to 1440px
like this :
and that's what I did actually and everything is going Ok at least that's what I thought but when I use the viewport width ( increasing, decreasing it) I see some unexpected results
this is on 605px viewport width:
I built this app with absolute positioning and I applied a position relative to the img in the background, maybe this is bad practice I know , please note that the app looks great on all devices that the device toolbar offers me.
some of my friends adviced me to use a framework and get rid of all these headaches but really I wanna practice vanilla CSS very well please consider that this is my first app and I'm doing my best to make it look great on all devices
so my question is:
should I leave it like this because logically If it looks ok on the
devices like Iphone 6 ... (the devices that the device toolbar
offers me) I don't need to address the viewport width issue.
or should I use a framework and I don't like this solution I know
it's feasible and as I told you I wanna practice vanilla css.
or should I use another technologie like flexbox or grid system and
this is the hardest solution I think because I'm gonna rebuild the
entire app, but it's ok.
and the last thing I wanna ask about is: is there anythings should I be aware of in my future projects especially if I'm working with vanilla CSS
Congrats on building your first app!
1) When posting questions on Stackoverflow, it is always helpful to provide either an example of your code directly in your post, and/or to include a link to a running version of your code on a site like jsfiddle.net, JSbin.com, codepen.io, etc.
2) For most responsive apps, there are almost always a couple of widths where things do not look exactly perfect. These points are usually right before/after a breakpoint transition.
3) In general, you don't want to use position relative or absolute for handling page layout. There are a number of situations where they can be helpful, but I think its safe to say that they should never be the first thing you reach for when trying to create the layout of a page.
4) Right now, the best way to handle page layout with regular CSS -- no library -- is probably Flexbox because of its versatility and adoption of all major browsers. I highly recommend you learn it and become familiar with it.
5) There is nothing wrong with using a library for general page structure stuff. Because of its use with a ton of companies, I highly recommend you become familiar with Bootstrap -- specifically its grid framework. If you do go this route, read the rules for certain things very carefully. For example, I cannot tell you how many people have their apps look screwed up because they don't follow the cardinal rule of Bootstrap's grid system: The only children of a row should be col. Say that 10 times.
Best of luck to you!

Responsive Web Design

I am new at html and css and when I increase my browser size my entire layout gets messed up and elements start overlapping one another. Can anyone show me a way to make my layout become responsive? Thank you in advance!
It depends on what you wanna do.
1) If you're learning HTML5 and CSS than you've got to watch towards bootstrap media queries to code fully responsive. To go further you will also need Javascript. There are also paying technologies.
2) If you just wanna make a responsive website without caring about the coding side, you should choose a CMS like Wordpress, Joomla etc... It will be faster for you and with a good responsive template, a very decent solution.
There is a nice tutorial in w3schools that uses we3.css stylesheet framework, very easy to start and see the entire problem. It uses images of different size and adpat itself to pc, tablets, smarthpones. Try it, I mean read, it is a short one, and will help you a lot, can you implement without adding that file, but changing easily yours.

Responsive gridding what is it and how to achieve it

I just tested few of my webpages in cross browsers testing tool and found out that for lower resolutions all my divs were not coming separately.
Afters googling I found out about responsive griding.
After reading that I wanted to ask that whether responsive griding is nothing but making your web page responsive to different changes in screen sizes or does it have anything more to it
Also I am using purecss to make my web page responsive so I needed to know whether this is the right way or and what other ways are there to do this.
Pretty much, it's also about curtailing content based on your audience. Say that people on mobile don't need to read all the reviews on the page you would hide it or show it in a different way. Whether or not to use pure is completely your personal preference. There are a gargantuan amount of responsive frameworks, you should look at what they offer to your own goals of customization or extensibility. Foundation for example offers lovely JavaScript addons you can use for modals, sliders and navigation.
Good luck and please add to your question if you need to ask more!
Your choice to use pure I feel is a good one because its extremely light weight and style agnostic. While bootstrap and foundation are more popular choices they can be up to 10 to 20 times larger.
Check out TukTuk as well, its similar in nature to Pure:
http://tuktuk.tapquo.com/
Yes, you've got the right idea. You can use frameworks like Twitter Bootstrap, or Zurb Foundation, which have all the CSS you need for responsive grids. The basic idea is using CSS media queries to apply different CSS rules for different screen sizes. Javascript can also be used to show/hide features which might work better on mobile.

how to make my website fluid?

I've never done this before. The website I have just built is the second one I have ever built. There is a main container div and a header. I noticed that this simple html/css and js site looks terrible on mobile devices.
When it comes to making the site fluid are there any rules or approaches to make it quick and easy? If I just start changing all set pixel widths to percentages will the elements lose thir alignment in relation to each other? For example, the image in the main image slider is aligned, using pixels, based upon the position of the logo in the header.
Before I get started any pointers would be most appreciated. Here is the site: www.hauswoods.com
I would suggest you look into media queries instead, this will allow you to specify CSS related to different screen sizes. Yes, you could change your website to a liquid/fluid layout but with your current content, getting the slider and images to look right will be a headache.
A quick and easy approach would be to use a framework like Bootstrap (http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/)
I'm sure some people would argue that you won't learn if you use that (because it will do a lot for you), but I think you can learn by example.
Bootstrap uses progressive enhancement principles to improve UIs and uses something called 'Less' for making CSS a bit more generic (at the expense of some complexity). Still, you can use whichever bits you like from it. If you've got a greenfield site it's a good place to start. It supports fluid layouts and explains to you how your design will degrade on mobile devices with smaller screens.
There are plenty of good tutorials out there:
http://green-beast.com/blog/?p=199
http://www.maxdesign.com.au/articles/liquid/
http://css-tricks.com/the-perfect-fluid-width-layout/
Below are IMHO some of the best JS-frameworks/html5-templaters that help with what you're trying to achieve. No need to re-invent the wheel.
Twitter Bootstrap
Foundation
CreateJS
Skeleton
HTML5 Boilerplate
HTML KickStart
Montage HTML5 Framework
SproutCore
Zebra
if you want your website to be fluid just use percentage instead of pixels.
.classname{
width: 80%;
}

Would responsive design be the way to go in this case?

I have coded a very complex php game with around 40 pages. I am now in the process of designing it. Would responsive design be the right choice in this case? What other options are available? Maybe I should just make three layouts (3 different stylesheets - normal, tablets and mobiles)?
It just seems like a ridiculous amount of work moving all these elements since there are so many pages.
Creating a responsive site is not that difficult from the html/css point of view, although I'm not sure how your php will affect that. You actually always have the same classes/ids, and just apply styles to them using the media queries (inside the same sheet). It would mean a lot more effort to write 3 separate sheets, but then again: depends on your code. In general, the trick is just to have good semantic, clean code (use positions wisely, for example). It takes some time to get everything organised at first, but once you have the basics structured with responsiveness in mind it gets really easy. Those 40 pages should all have the same structure, right?
Another option would be a liquid design. Instead of changing the styles, you use percentages or dynamic measures. But I strongly recommend grids, and you only have to do it once and it won't be long until everyone does responsive sites.
But if the game is complex and need some serious tweaking, you should consider doing a completely separate thing for mobile (tablets should be easy enough to adapt, your choice). It really depends on the product design, things can look very different in 320px wide. Good luck with the game!
If the content will be the same on all the devices and you can't think of a good reason to fork the code to provide different content for different devices, responsive design is the way to go.