Be Responsive

I’ve decided to work on a world class product marketplace.  Part of developing that marketplace has forced me to look at modern development philosophy in a new way.

I have been developing ‘responsive’ sites for years before they were called ‘responsive’.  I am very glad to see that I no longer need to do it the hard way and can rely on mature libraries like bootstrap.  It was tedious getting HTML 4 to spread over multiple screens and devices.  Whenever I solved the stretchy screen dilemma I would always arrive at the point where I would have to slice up my design and start wrapping it with dynamic code.  Once you start doing this; modifying that original design can be tricky even when using modern approaches such s MVC. With that in mind we developed a template editor years ago that could handle that scenario.  The next three months involve working on version 3 of that editor.

I decided to take a look at the new fluid layouts in Dreamweaver and concluded that they are almost the exact same thing as bootstrap only it was ‘adobe’d’.  I guess both work just as well… in the end I opted to use bootstrap over Dreamweaver CC to do this.  Although I did find the Dreamweaver implementation very easy to use and is a good choice if you are just starting out. I just felt for what I am doing that I didn’t want to locked into a product.

 

dw CC fluid

Once I started laying out the marketplace, I found myself thinking about marketing and design again [currently enrolled in MKTG396 course].  Often times I get stuck here or caught up in the technical details.  Instead of dwelling; I decided to just ‘build’ the coolest things I could. 50 pages later I was looking at a masterpiece of responsive ART.

I look at the site every day and click and refine things.  The development team at 1MB is working on integrating item variations across platforms and we are using responsive layout to drive the solution.

In the end I think we will have a serious international contender for a hosted selling platform. We will launch with 280,000 products in a few short months.

~JCF