Responsive Theme Design
Quick design of the themeNot seeing his name mentioned on the first 5-10 pages (or in the index) doesn't augur well for a novel predicated on responsive web design! As I delved further into the subject, I came across a number of cases where no consideration was given to presenting, the coding styles were not consistent, or we could not figure out why certain codes were used.
Sometimes there are also smaller mistakes in the source text, such as too many semicolons being used; all this contributes to a bad first appearance when you read the work. Quoting at the top of section 1, followed by the nasty referral hyperlink, was an example of how I wouldn't do it!
- It was often low-grade pictures that made reading difficult; in many cases the arrow made reading more difficult, with little or no relation to the text. One case (P109) is the big picture not readable at all... - The reporting on press inquiries is very bad - this seems to be only over 6 pages, with little contents and certainly not with regard to development utilities like the Responsive Design Viewer in Google Chrome.
- Much text editing seems to be used - the emphasis should be on coding, not on which text to use! - WordPress installation and setup" - we are spending too much of our lives discussing which web servers to use and then fall down to a shortcut for the most crucial part of the game!
- The final part of the blockbuster seems to be all about style plug-ins, with little coding that I would see as a reaction? I can see in the section "Making the image gallery responsive" that width:100% is used to substitute a value of -150px, which is fine, but what about the maximum width?
There is little I see about medium requests - the section has a referee, but nothing that explains the effect (i.e. it keeps the full width, regardless of the size). To someone running a number of WordPress groups in Toronto, Canada, I had been expecting much more useful contents explaining how responsive items work in WordPress and where we can actually see the results in the source text.
Instead, the blockbuster books rely more and more on plug-ins as we go through - I would cut down on the number of plug-ins used and concentrate more on creating a fresh design so that we see the real gut instincts of how we can make WordPress pages react. Reactive web design doesn't need to learn many different programming styles, so programming should be simple; using plug-ins can make things more bewildering!
However, the crux here is the correct and consistent use of these technologies - something I'm not sure it's being done here...that the shortage of contents around press inquiries, Ethan Marcotte (and his formula), the celebrated Golden Section and unhandled issues, makes for a very frustrating reading that is difficult to suggest.
In fact, I had hoped to see some useful hints from the writer that came from his work in various WordPress groups - that would have really made the books worth it........