osCmax and Templates, Responsive, CSS, and frameworks

A few years back I was working up a site in osCmax (osCommerce fork) and while the templating system was good it left a lot of issues with cross browser compatibility. I blogged several posts and some lengthy commentary on how I set it up with Blueprint, a CSS framework.

Revisiting osCmax recently I am now looking again at templates or themes and I have noted that Blueprint has not been updated since 2011 only a short while after my last efforts into my Blueprint for osCmax efforts.

As a result, I am doing more reading, and particularly on the more recent Responsive frameworks. Blueprint may well have atrophied simply due to the rapid increase in mobility issues for web design.

I’d observe that in some cases I expect that I do not need a responsive website and unless I know that I am working to a market that has a prevalence of mobile visits, then what is the point ? I have a particular site that I manage and I know from its’ stats over 10 years or more of views, that even today 80% of users are PC based and the 20% tend to be more unknowns than emphatically mobile. Further, even if the 20% were all mobile users, they may well be ok with the existing CSS styles that still present the site in a usable fashion on a tablet. Phone and small screen users may also be ok, and even if I ‘ask the audience’ do I get a response that I can use?

At this stage I am thinking that if I do deploy a responsive framework, then I will do so as a backend ‘good idea’ to maybe future-proof the site for an advent of a mobile tipping point. And to achieve that I should review the possible frameworks, just not from a ‘mobile-first’ perspective.

 

 

2 replies on “osCmax and Templates, Responsive, CSS, and frameworks”

  1. As of 4/21/15, Google has announced it will begin demoting you in the search engine listings if your site template isn’t compatible with mobile phones, even if your customers don’t use mobile much. However, I can’t find a responsive theme for the current or recent osMax versions anywhere, including paid templates. Sadly, this will force me to abandon use of oscMax.

    • Hi

      This was one of the key reasons for me to review and I have reached a similar conclusion. Noting that one option is to provide resources into osCmax to make responsive stuff happen, but I still come back to basics and osCmax is based on osCommerce 2.2 which is a 16 year old system with inherent issues that do not lend themselves to fixing properly. osCommerce 2.x design issues are the key reason that osCommerce 3.x is so radically different that there is no current upgrade path. Further osCommerce 3.x is already 9 years old and still no release in sight. We have to move on.

      cheers
      Tony

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