625.uk.com

I've been meaning to figure out how to do responsive web design and this weekend I burned the midnight oil and pulled something together...

The result is just a single page, I'm afraid, and I'm not completely happy with it, but I think it's a pretty good first stab and the code I've written should make it easier to convert other pages.

The page is the description of the BBC 1 "COW" - the first solid state globe...
http://625.uk.com/tv_logos/bbc1_85.htm

It should play nicely on phones, tablets and laptops/desktops - with some elements of the page moving from a one to two and then three column display.

For those interested in this sort of thing, after looking at Skeleton and other frameworks, I settled on using the CSS from W3Schools (W3CSS).

Plenty of responsive template around - Bootstrap, W3CSS, Boilerplate to name three - but doesn't to be super complicated if you don't want it to be, the main benefit of those is they give you a starting point and make things looks pretty out the box.

Think your main problem with that page on non Windows systems will be the video of the COW. While on a desktop VLC will play the .RAM files in the absence of RealPlayer, Android can't play them out of the box without extra help (such as VLC off the Play Store for example).

Might I suggest using server side includes to make this much easier for you to update in future?

You could, of course, migrate to PHP or whatever, but changing your page format to SHTML rather than HTML would be absolutely simple and would bring you big benefits.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/519619/what-is-shtml

SSI isn't a bad idea - there are many ways to achieve the same effect, which is just basically a very cut down content management system.

But yeah basically you get a template that's made up of other pages and they come together like a jigsaw puzzle when somebody looks at the page. Really good, easy to update and easy to add to later. Fancy a new header colour? Just change the one file and everything else updates itself. Much like fast internet, you'll wonder how you ever managed before

Point taken about the old RealMedia 8 file. I've transformed it from that into MP4 (so it's still low quality but at least in a widely used format) and made it playable on the page with the HTML 5 Video tag.

I've also fixed the header text so that it stays close to the images, which was annoying me.

Updated page: http://625.uk.com/tv_logos/bbc1_85.htm

The idea of using server-side includes or CMS to make the assembly of pages and changing things in bulk is an interesting one. I realised in time for the Flash stuff that I could use Classic ASP to build an include file that would handle the layout of each of the files (eg http://625.uk.com/tv_logos/svg/border_71.asp). But everything else is static HTML for now - for one thing, I don't really want to change existing URLs

Don't need to change the URLs, you can simply redirect them server side so any links that people have bookmarked will send them to the new pages directly.

Have a look at "URL redirection".

Hi Neil, I'm running on a Windows Server running IIS, and I think to redirect from .htm pages I would need access to manage IIS, and I don't have that, AFAIK.

If you're using IIS7, and deploying a website using the .NET Framework; you can set redirects in your Web.Config.