Preparing Legacy Help Projects for Responsive Design

Do you have legacy help projects whose content is still valid and that you’d like to make responsive? The latest releases of popular help authoring tools make it easy to make legacy projects responsive with just a few mouse clicks.

Unfortunately, legacy projects were often designed and created in ways that break responsive design. For example, many legacy projects use “hidden” tables to lay out images, an approach that was wrong but worked, until responsive design came along. What do you need to do to fix those problems?

In this practical session, we’ll look at:

• The concept of the “un-desktop” and its effect on design.
• A quick review of the technical concepts of responsive design.
• The need to eliminate local formatting in favor of styles and a CSS and how to do so.
• The use of often unfamiliar CSS features - relative sizing for fonts and images and the use of the img float property to create fluid layout grids - and new features in CSS3 - media queries and breakpoint designation.
• Effect of scaling on images, deciding when to include or exclude images, and the effect of excluding images on text that reference those images.
• Effect of scaling on image maps.
• Automating wording customization – from “click” to “tap” automatically.
• And more.

At the end of this session, you’ll know how to deal with the most common responsive design problems in legacy help projects. And many of the solutions will improve the coding of your projects even if you never make those projects responsive.

Visiting Dojo Expert

Neil Perlin, Hyper/Word, is an internationally-known consultant specializing in helping companies use their information efficiently, effectively, and correctly in all kinds of outputs using a wide range of tools.

Watch the Videos

Part 1

Recorded: November 2015

Part 2

Recorded: December 2015

You might also be interested in...