Time waits for nobody, and technology is even more impatient. Our web site was not responsive, then it wasn’t adaptive. Now it’s adaptive, mostly. This means that beautiful big images now adapt to teeny tiny phone screens.
Not only did the site need a whole new set of icons for better visual identity, it needed each page to be redesigned for about five different devices so it could adapt to whatever screen people were using to view it. Each image needed re-positioning, dynamic scaling and adjustment of two parameters. Other parameters had to be constantly checked. The menus would lose formatting for no apparent reason. Page backgrounds appeared and disappeared. Master pages either worked fine – or got lost in translation.
Then the thing had to be checked. Corrected. Re-checked. Re-corrected. I’m sure there are wild bugs still running amok, but at least they’re better at hiding than they were.
Hopefully this will lead to happy viewers. It will certainly be easier to pass the site around on a phone in a bar while quaffing a heady craft beer. Why someone would want to do this is a mystery, but at least I’ve facilitated the process.
Still, I feel like someone who went from beautiful, large art on vinyl to teeny cassette covers. What was large, expansive and full of fun animated rollovers is now slave to the tiny screen, where rollovers don’t exist. Yet, the site does work on large screens in high definition (for now… 4k is coming, then six, then… well, I don’t really want to know).
So, enjoy the new site, pass the phone and if you like it, buy me a beer next time we meet.