Are there any simple guides to making a site responsive

[David Clarke]

Thanks Sarah. I will try that. I have been trying on a snapshot myself, although I did fiddle with starting from scratch, but it was so much work.

Chicken housman - £100 per month is still less than the £400 I have to pay for Sellerdeck support. Even with the credit card processing added (I do get about a 1% charge already) and hosting, it works out a lot more, and I don't have to pay for support if I don't want to. I guess this is more relevant to the thread on "sellerdeck basic pricing has increased".

I have been fiddling with a trial of sellerdeck on my laptop with changing the design, but I need to sort out a new hosting place to see how it works in the "real" world. That's another reason I was hoping for a quick guide - to avoid the lengthy trial and error I am currently faced with.

[chickenhouseman]

Other people have come back to me with more sensible quotes so I will probably go that route and freshen the site up with some design updates

[feemish]

I noted down the colours used on my present site in Design: Themes, the file name of the logo, etc, and set up the new rd design (Smart) with these same colours, and the logo, and all was fine.
Sarah

Did you manage to get a background colour?

Can you put up a link to your site so I can see how it looks?

[printerbase]

If people are worried about loosing traffic to Google's upcoming mobile changes have a read of this article:
http://searchengineland.com/much-tra...calypse-216564

I got it through a Moz email, it also has some very interesting links at the bottom of the article as well.

Peter

[intrapreneur]

When Google says jump, I say how high?

Google webmaster tools took the trouble to email me twice about the mobile unfriendliness of our SD11 site and that was quite enough for me to be galvanised into action!

I have been used to paying for the services of web developers to tweak our site periodically, so it wasn't too much of a shock to have to do that again.

To cushion the financial shock, I went with the monthly sub to upgrade to SD14 and then had the excellent Kenny Fraser do the necessary work from the responsive wire frame upwards.

I did also get a round of quotes for making our V11 site responsive but for me the choice was obvious.

So much of our business comes from organic search results that it's frankly dangerous to ignore Google's early warnings.

[malbro]

What we need here is some middle ground for both Sellerdeck's future, and other third party companies who rely on Sellerdeck users for designs and plugins.

It seems we have 2 options here, a choice of 2 Sellerdeck templates that are very basic, or paying over £10k for a custom option.

Ok, I'm not really sure on the work involved to justify £10k for a design but surely the majority of the work is the functioning site, with say the last 10% the actual visual element.

Would it not be possible for one of the designers on here, or Sellerdeck just to use a custom £10k template which has already been produced, change the 10% that makes it a unique looking site and then license it as a template for a few hundred pounds to the masses?

The main problem in converting from a 'Standard' design to the responsive design is the amount of custom code that you have in your currrent site. The more custom code the harder it is to do and some people do not even realise just how much customisation there may be in their current site.

The simple way is to import your normal design into Sellerdeck 2014, and allow it to upgrade, if you have a version earlier than 2013 then the best way to make sure it upgrades correctly is to put it through each version in turn so the upgrader for each version removes problems that may appear if you just jump from say V10 to Sellerdeck 2014. At this point I import a responsive design as a design import, I saved the two available themes separately, and this seems to give the best update process.

Now make sure the 2014 theme colours match your previous version, if your original design actually made use of the theme colours this will work quite well but a lot of problems occur because the original site did not actually honour the theme colours, instead it uses customisation through css files, these customisations are lost in the upgrade process..

Large logos need reducing in size to work correclty and if you want to start making major colour changes you will need to examine all the css templates that are listed at the beginning of the 'Current Stylesheet', namely 'Core Styles', 'Responsive CSS' and 'Responsive css part 2'.

I have done several upgrades this way both 2013 and 2014 and learnt a lot about the way the themes and the css work. You will need to be familiar with the latest css styling if you want to make major changes to the responsive themes, and you will need access to an iPad, an iPhone, an Android Smart phone, and an Android tablet to check out your design, as well as IE, Firefox and Chrome browsers on your main PC. I have found iPhone/iPad emulators give very poor results compared with the real thing.

DO NOT use the inbuilt preview it will likely give a completly wrong impression of the site as the version of IE used depends on the version on your PC.

[David Clarke]

Thanks for that reply. I have been trying importing my site and then supply a design snapshot. One thing I found is very important is that when you first install Sellerdeck, and before you have imported your site, save a snapshot of the default site, otherwise it is very hard to get back to a "clean" site after importing my original one.

[malbro]

Thanks for that reply. I have been trying importing my site and then supply a design snapshot. One thing I found is very important is that when you first install Sellerdeck, and before you have imported your site, save a snapshot of the default site, otherwise it is very hard to get back to a "clean" site after importing my original one.

Sorry I should have made that clear, as I have the Designer Version, I can run multiple sites thus it is easy for me to create that snapshot simply be generating a new site.

It is possible to simply apply the relevant theme to your site once you have converted to 2014 but I have found a number of problems occur with this method when working with customised sites, I have found the application of the design snapshot to be more reliable.

[gail]

I'm in the same boat as a lot of the previous posters i.e my turnover doesn't justify thousands on an upgrade but I also can't afford to drop down the rankings.

The sites on the Showcase look good and are nice and simple. What would be good for us is to purchase a template like any of those and simply add your own products / header etc to it.

OK it might take a while as I suspect you'd need to add everything individually to it as in starting a site from scratch but if you have the time (as I have) it would be a much cheaper option than having a custom design made for your own site and making an earlier site fit it.

Does this sound a good idea to any developers out there? or do you have something similar for sale already?

[David Laine]

Count me in too

I would like to be able to buy a theme that I would be able to use to rebuild my V9 site into v!4

(the out of the box responsive theme I am told does have bugs in it)

I think more should have been done to the new themes built into V14

I have just re took all 300+ pics of my products and now I am ready to start rebuilding the new look site

[malbro]

I'm in the same boat as a lot of the previous posters i.e my turnover doesn't justify thousands on an upgrade but I also can't afford to drop down the rankings.

The sites on the Showcase look good and are nice and simple. What would be good for us is to purchase a template like any of those and simply add your own products / header etc to it.

OK it might take a while as I suspect you'd need to add everything individually to it as in starting a site from scratch but if you have the time (as I have) it would be a much cheaper option than having a custom design made for your own site and making an earlier site fit it.

Does this sound a good idea to any developers out there? or do you have something similar for sale already?

You can use the hierarchical export to export your data from the existing site, load Sellerdeck 2014, select your theme, import your data. Alternatively load Sellerdeck 2014, save the theme as a snapshot, import your snapshot from 2013, import the saved theme as a design snapshot. In both cases you will have a 2014 version of your site that will need work, the amount of work depends on the original site.

Or are you saying you do not like the two themes avaialble and you want a different one, if so how does a designer know what template would suit you all.

[gail]

You can use the hierarchical export to export your data from the existing site, load Sellerdeck 2014, select your theme, import your data. Alternatively load Sellerdeck 2014, save the theme as a snapshot, import your snapshot from 2013, import the saved theme as a design snapshot. In both cases you will have a 2014 version of your site that will need work, the amount of work depends on the original site.

Or are you saying you do not like the two themes avaialble and you want a different one, if so how does a designer know what template would suit you all.

That's fine for a standard site. Mine isn't anything special but there are still quite a few custom areas that would need work.

Importing it into a responsive site would (I'd guess) be almost as much work as starting from scratch.

What we need are templates from designers that we can buy. Admittedly I haven't looked for a while but a lot of designers/developers used to have a range of templates for sale. They just need to introduce some for 2014.

I'm sure there would be a market for them.

[musicscotland]

Responsive upgrade

Ideally starting from as 'scratch' as possible on a 2014 site is what feels safest to me. Copy across product (and other custom) images into Site1, bring in the content with a hierarchical import, use the Design Wizard to get the basic responsive layout and theme, re-apply Business Settings etc. This approach is probably worth a try in the first instance to get as clean an installation as possible.

However with a more customised site there's likely to be functionality that doesn't carry across. For example it seems that you can't transfer custom variables between versions using Export Specific Design Elements so these would need to be recreated manually before the hierarchical import. Content Categories would need to be in place as well, anything that the csv content refers to that isn't built-in to 2014. So upgrading the site is probably a quicker option than solving those separate issues.

It is possible to simply apply the relevant theme to your site once you have converted to 2014 but I have found a number of problems occur with this method when working with customised sites, I have found the application of the design snapshot to be more reliable.

I'm curious as to what these problems are Malcolm as I didn't experience any issues on the last upgrade I did, but on the next job I'll go along with your preferred route of applying a Design Snapshot of the Responsive Wireframe after upgrading.

I find I can't even access the Core Styles, Responsive CSS or Reponsive CSS Part 2 layouts from Current Stylesheet, only from Design Library. This makes it very tedious to edit CSS rules here to develop a design. I've found that creating an additional, separate custom.css stylesheet to override whatever's churned out into actinic.css is the overall least time-consuming way to develop a customised design. You can use your favoured text editor, avoid SellerDeck's generation process, edit on the live site quickly with FTP if need be, generate with Sass/Compass if you're inclined, move it to the end of actinic.css when you're finished.

It is best practice in terms of performance to edit actinic.css directly, as the rules are edited high up in the cascade to avoid additional overriding lines further down. However, SellerDeck isn't great for performance as even the bare Responsive Wireframe actinic.css without any significant design weighs in at 100-120KB, even when compacted. Not insignificant for a smartphone on a mobile data connection to have to deal with on arrival to your home page, never mind the big slideshow images...

[completerookie]

We can't win with "the Big G"
My first website had vey little optimisation or thought, but it works and generates a living
I can see that my CSS is about 17kb runs everything,
google speed test generates 58/100
tells me to minify CSS and JS and enable compression
gives a user experience of 67/100
Use legible font sizes
target screen sizes
passes "3 rules"
even the preview in their SmartPhone looks "ok"

my second website, took a lot off thoughts over this one, and spent quite a lot of time optimising it.
I can see that my CSS is about 35kb runs everything,
google speed test generates 86/100
tells me to minify CSS and JS and optomize images
gives a user experience of 67/100
Use legible font sizes
target screen sizes
passes "6 rules"
even the preview in their SmartPhone looks "ok"

and yet they tell me to use responsive designs, and start downloading a minimum of 120k of CSS + lots of JS,
when I look at bbc.co.uk I get 255kb of CSS and so it goes on.

where the heck does one go with this.
seems it will pay me to "optimize both old sites without going to Responsive designs"

I downloaded the trial of sellerdeck, and you can't save/restore snapshots, I can't import any products from v8 to v2014 using flat files, (I've got customised variables that prevent that)
I wrote a programme to remove customised variable comments and then imported and got jsut 46 errors out 500+ products with lots of pics, text, options, permutations but when I look at the end result, it may be "responsive" but its a dogs dinner, and I need to putback a load of formatting to re-instate my carefully formatted technical specification tables that work so well in the old sites.

not at all sure which way to go and the big G doesn't help at all

[newshopbloke]

Hi all,

Im testing sd 14 responsive smart template and I like it, especially as ive just bought a diamond pendant ring on my iphone

I want to import my current sd 13 site into the smart responsive template, is this easy to do ?

I understand that most of my current website will be completely messed up by this, but obviously I have multiple site snapshots and sd 13 running alongside.