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.