I’ve updated the Clary Lake Association website with a new fully responsive mobile-ready and mobile-friendly theme. You might recall that I threatened to do this just yesterday! In fact I had no idea that I’d be cutting over to a new site so soon but I found a more or less suitable theme that required only minor changes and those took less time than I had anticipated.

There are a few issues I’m aware of, and I’m still finding new ones. The primary feature of a responsive website theme is that text and images are automagically resized to fit whatever screen a visitor is using. However, images on our Water Level Charts page actually originate on our Clary Dam Operation Log and are dynamically generated by Google. These don’t automatically resize. I’m still pondering how to resolve that issue. One solution is to change them from “interactive” to static images which is probably what I’ll do. I could also provide mobile-friendly images in addition to the ones we’re using now. Also, a few of the sidebar “widgets” have turned out to be nonfunctional and I’ve had to remove them. Chances are you won’t notice they’re gone.

Also, our vast collection of header images is not part of this theme. Yet. I’ll get them added in as time permits. Our vast collection of picture galleries on the other hand are working just fine.

Also, the menus aren’t quite like I’d like them. The default theme behavior is to left-justify the menu but that looks ugly. I much prefer centered menus but some submenus don’t fit entirely on the screen. This can probably be fixed with some judicious editing and menu redesign.

Another thing I noticed when viewing the site on my phone was that posts with a left-aligned  image in them (that is at least 204 pixels wide so Facebook will display them!) are very hard to read on a phone because the first sentence or two of the post is crammed into the far right side of the screen (smartphone users will know what I’m talking about!) so I’ll probably start centering the images, and/or using smaller images. Not my favorite layout, but at least visitors with smartphones won’t have problems reading the post.

If you’re a smartphone user, shoot me an email or use our contact form and let me know what you think of our new mobile-friendly website theme!