Responsive Design Rollout

Forum Moderators: not2easy

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Responsive Design Rollout

JohnNZ

9:43 pm on Mar 4, 2015 (gmt 0)

Hi, I've just enhanced my website to have a responsive design for mobile devices. As part of the changes, I've worked my way through the tips in the pinned article in this forum, which was a big help! I've tested the new design locally, using both physical mobile devices and the Responsive Design View in Firefox Dev Edition.

But now I'm looking for some final tests or even 'gotchas' from people who have been through a similar process. May be even a tool that people use to check their sites. Just in case it helps, the site is driven by perl scripts reading flat files, built using Dreamweaver with a small number of templates.

Any suggestions or tips for final checks are gratefully accepted.

not2easy

10:23 pm on Mar 4, 2015 (gmt 0)

Congratulations for getting it done! Some of the places to get validation and feedback on any errors are these:
Google's own pagespeed analysis tool: [developers.google.com...]
This one can give you ideas to make your site faster, along with any errors found. The primary concern for that tool is page speed.

There are two options from W3C where the standards come from: [jigsaw.w3.org...] is their CSS Validator which I would start with before going to their Validator Suite (Free Trial):
[validator-suite.w3.org...] because the Suite is a paid tool and the free trial works best after you take care of any issues with the other two tools. I hope you get the go ahead from these, or if needed, help to pinpoint any issues.

JohnNZ

11:13 pm on Mar 4, 2015 (gmt 0)

Thanks for that not2easy!

Nothing much on the free CSS Validator, but there are some pagespeed issues, whilst not Responsive-specific will help to speed the site up on all devices! I shall plough into those and get as many fixed as possible before going live.

However both tools are for already live sites (i.e. on the web). My new site is still locally based, is there anything like the above that runs on a Windows desktop for local websites?

Or, alternatively, do people generally release a test/dev version to the web for these tests? E.g. example.com using, say, dev.example.com for testing purposes? (one of my concerns about this method would be a duplicate content issue with Google)

not2easy

2:26 am on Mar 5, 2015 (gmt 0)

One way I've done this kind of testing is to create a page I want to test, name it "test.html" or some other non-real-page name, add a no-index, noarchive metatag (in the tiny chance that a page with no inbound links might be crawled during the short time it may take to run tests) and ftp it to the site with any supporting files. Use that URL for testing, then delete the files from the site. If your testing involves more than you can get from checking a page I would set it up in a new, temp folder that's blocked in robots and not leave it online longer than needed.

There are other ways to setup testing environments, it depends a lot on how long you need to keep it online.