Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

Development Tools

Posted by Dylan Hobbs
Dylan Hobbs
9,279 Points

Best practices for turning existing site into mobile

I have an existing site at work that I am working on that the client would like transferred into a framework like bootstrap/zurb.

Just curious how hard it is to transfer an existing site into a framework like that if it wasn't originally built on it. Or if it's even the best route to go.

1 Answer

Chris Shaw
Chris Shaw
26,676 Points
Chris Shaw
Chris Shaw
26,676 Points

Hi Dylan,

The first thing that I always try to keep in mind is the budget the client has for the project, in the past I have been set a very small amount of time to make a site responsive but only had time to more or less shimmy the responsive code in which made things code wise horrible but it looked and functioned fine.

Since then I've permanently set aside the concept of make it work and have gone with Foundation and mobile first design, selling the idea of rebuilding the site starting at mobile devices can be hard to sell to a client especially for an existing website as the designer has to keep in mind that the site must also transform back into the same desktop site without huge changes to the layout.

All-in-all from my personal experience I make sure Foundation is part of my workflow as it has all the fixes for all browsers, it comes with the best grid in my experience and lots of small UI elements that make it easily to rebuild with.

Hope that helps.

Dylan Hobbs
Dylan Hobbs
9,279 Points

Hi Chris,

Thanks a a lot for all the info.

I've worked with both foundation and bootstrap equally and so far I am in between the two.

I have made the site responsive temporarily using media queries for a few devices (iphone portrait/landscape and ipad portrait/landscape)

The site wasn't even designed by me as they outsourced the work half a year ago to some poor developers. The code is incredibly messy with no comments at all and it's a real headache to be honest haha.

I'm just trying to think of the best way to attack this and get it over with in as short amount of time as possible as I do not have much experience yet with transferring pre-existing sites into mobile or applying frameworks to them.

I'm always down for a challenge though, if you recommend zurb for this I will give it a go!

Cheers!

ivomiranda
ivomiranda
30,286 Points

Hi Chris. Is your website broken? I go to google when I try to press any tab :P

Chris Shaw
Chris Shaw
26,676 Points
Chris Shaw
Chris Shaw
26,676 Points

That's my firewall, I had some unwanted visitors sucking up my bandwidth by attempting to break into my site so I blocked countries based on the origin.

ivomiranda
ivomiranda
30,286 Points

Heheh :D I guess Portugal is on the blacklist then :P I can see all tabs except the Contact Me. Nice portfolio. Do you have any website using foundation or similar?