Introducing Perfect Duluth Day’s new responsive design

pdd-responsive1

It’s been over five years since we’ve freshened things up around here. Welcome to the new look of PDD. At the moment we’re still fixing all the things that are breaking left and right as a result of messing with the layout of the PDD Blog, but soon things will be functioning better than ever.

Here are some fancy bullet points to get you up to speed:

  • What we have done, essentially, is changed PDD’s WordPress theme. The result is a responsive design that will adapt to whatever device you are using to view this website.
  • If you are on a desktop computer, you’ll notice the content field is bigger and the navigation sidebar that used to be on the left of all pages is gone. Everything that was there is still available through the navigation at the top of the page.
  • If you are on a phone or tablet, everything about this website should look much better.
  • A lot of little things have changed because of this new theme, and we can’t really break them all down at the moment. It’s just too much. Feel free, however, to ask questions in the comments or e-mail help @ perfectduluthday.com.
  • Photos and videos can be bigger now, and, as a consequence, some of our old pages will have bad layouts because they were tweaked for the old setup. We’ll fix them here and there as we notice them, but many of them will stay messed up forever. There are over 7,000 posts in our WordPress archives. It would take a while to tidy them all up.
  • Most of our Help Topics contain false information that we need to update. We’ll get to that slowly.
  • The PDD Calendar still has the old layout. We’re going to update that, too, but we don’t want to break everything at once. So first we’ll focus on fixing the blog.

We hope you dig it.

 

20 Comments

joel

about 10 years ago

Looks great, Paul!

Love it!

Aldin

about 10 years ago

Low contrast colors for text is stupid.
I hate the menu bar that sticks to the top of the screen that are so popular now, to get rid of the damn thing I had to disable all scripts on this page.
For me this change has done nothing to improve PDD.

Paul Lundgren

about 10 years ago

We're definitely going to make the comment text less faded. It was a long night of fixing issues, so we haven't been tweaking much today. We'll get to it.

The menu bar is just a reality of responsive design.  It's a tiny bar at the top of the page that allows you to navigate the site. We've got to stick with that.

emmadogs

about 10 years ago

Well, I fear change, so take my comment for what it's worth, but:  in the old days, when I clicked to read a particular comment on a post, I would then see that particular comment, and could then scroll down through subsequent comments (I hope that makes sense).  Now, I hit Paul's last comment, and the website took me to the first sentence of the post, so that I had to scroll all the way down to read the latest comment.  That's no problem with a string of four comments, but will be a big drag for the lengthier post comments.  So I'm hoping that can be changed.  Thanks!

vicarious

about 10 years ago

Looks fantastic. Loads like a drunk turtle (I'm sure you'll fix that). I like the menu bar at the top; it could be tweaked for special occasions/subjects.

wskyline

about 10 years ago

The one thing I don't like (besides the grey comment text) is that the recent comments only lists the 10 most recent comments. Sometimes when you're away from the site for a few days, or when one post gets tons of comments, you want to see more than the most recent 10.

Paul Lundgren

about 10 years ago

The grey comment text is on our list to fix. 

I think we used to show maybe the most recent 25 comments. I didn't realize it was only showing 10 now. We'll add that to the chore list. Thanks for pointing that out.

Chris

about 10 years ago

I prefer the look of desktop sites even though I do all my browsing on my iPad or my Note 3.  On the old site I always switched it from mobile to full/desktop, but I can't seem to find that option on the new design. Is it an option?

Paul Lundgren

about 10 years ago

No, there's no option, it's one design that adapts to your device. If you are on an iPad and view the site in landscape it should look the same as on a desktop. If you flip your iPad to portrait it will drop the ads below the content instead of displaying it in a column on the right.

Paul Lundgren

about 10 years ago

As far as the text issue goes, we've made an adjustment and the comments are now the same level of darkness as the text of posts. We're satisfied with it in our own bubble, but if any of you think the text should be darker, please groan about it here and maybe we will tweak it a bit more.

farnukem

about 10 years ago

Paul: I don't see where to subscribe to the comments RSS of a particular post...used to just be at the bottom of the post.  Could you let me know where to find that?  thanks!

Paul Lundgren

about 10 years ago

Thanks for mentioning that. We completely forgot about it. We'll restore that as soon as we remember how it worked.

Paul Lundgren

about 10 years ago

Actually, I think it has been here all along and we didn't notice it. If you are logged in you should see at the bottom of this page a box to check for e-mail notifications when there are new comments to this post.

Chris

about 10 years ago

I was about to write and say that email notifications weren't working on the new site. But before I did I checked my junk folder, and there they were. No idea why PDD notifications would suddenly go to junk folder when previously they went in my inbox.

Paul Lundgren

about 10 years ago

I'm not sure why that would  happen. Maybe the new WordPress makes those e-mails look more spammy.

Paul Lundgren

about 10 years ago

I suppose I should mention that the way to trigger the e-mail notifications is to check that box below while submitting a comment. If you don't submit a comment it won't recognize that you checked the box. So  you have to be involved in the conversation to follow it, apparently.

Paul Lundgren

about 10 years ago

We're still working on getting more than 10 comments to show up in the Recent Comments page -- which you wouldn't think would be that difficult. There also seems to be a lengthy delay before new comments show up there -- like half an hour -- which makes them not so recent. 

Once we take care of those issues and maybe five other smaller ones we might finally have this new theme nailed down.

Cory Fechner

about 10 years ago

Recent comments will now show 35 and it will show new comments realtime!

http://www.perfectduluthday.com/pdd-recent-comments/

Enjoy and have a #pdd

Paul Lundgren

about 10 years ago

I've been testing that comment subscriptions thing and I don't seem to be getting the e-mails, so there is likely still be an issue with that.

Is it working for anyone?

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