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General Discussion

Posted by rick white
rick white
8,225 Points

WP or Normalize? Responsive or Mobile First?

So, I'd like to start building a new tee shirt website. I've gone thru quite a few tracks and I have a little WP experience. WP, the Avada theme, has left me a little overwhelmed when it comes to customizing the site. The Treehouse Smells Like Bakin website seems much easier to customize.

I do want to support mobile and most browsers. Where should I begin?

thanks!

3 Answers

Peter Szerzo
Peter Szerzo
22,661 Points
Peter Szerzo
Peter Szerzo
22,661 Points

Rick,

As you say yourself, building your website from scratch much like the folks at Treehouse do offers you the most flexibility. It comes with the price of having to learn it all. On the other hand, you may find it hard to customize WordPress to your liking, but then again, it is much easier to get started. You can think of these two options as the extremes.

Using a CSS framework like Bootstrap or Foundation is an in-between option in terms of ease of use and room for customization. I would recommend looking into those. They offer a lot of instant gratification and are all in all quite fun to use - aand, they are both responsive. Treehouse is a good way to get started.

"Responsive or mobile first", as you mention in the title, do not exclude each other. Mobile first is a type of responsive web design. It sets layouts for a mobile device first, so that your phone does not have to process the more complex desktop layout as it renders the site. Bootstrap and Foundation are both mobile first.

Also, Normalize is not an alternative to WP. It is just a stylesheet that irons out the differences in default styles for the different browsers. It is a good idea to include it in your webpage.

Enjoy, Peter

rick white
rick white
8,225 Points

thanks vmuch, Peter.

Peter Mumford
Peter Mumford
7,774 Points
Peter Mumford
Peter Mumford
7,774 Points

If you want to put up a scratch php site, that is a more ambitious choice than launching a WordPress site. And in the long run the scratch site will be less flexible, less secure, and more work to maintain than a WordPress site (btw,I am biased; I build custom WP sites for a living).

The reason is that there are hundreds of thousands of programmers contributing to WordPress, and building WP themes and plugins. There is no way to compete with all that expertise. The vast number of choices does make WordPress intimidating to learn, but the build a WordPress site course on Treehouse will get you off to a very solid start.

As for Responsive, you should absolutely choose a responsive theme for your site. It might be mobile-first, but that is just one way to code a responsive site.

If you study WordPress on Treehouse, you can learn how to make your own theme, which gives you the most control.

rick white
rick white
8,225 Points

Hi Peter,

what approach would you suggest to create the below layout.

http://bigdropinc.com/

i would like to customize 4 or 5 large homepage frames. the first frame would be for company info, the last 3 or 4 would include individual products. I have 4 products to sell and i would like to present each on the homepage (with shopping cart options) and responsive.

thanks, rick

rick white
rick white
8,225 Points
rick white
rick white
8,225 Points

thank you, thank you, Peter. You guys are great.