Responsively retrofit older sites

This article first appeared in issue 235 of .net magazine – the world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers.

A word of warning: this tutorial may be a bit controversial. Especially if you, like me, are a firm believer in web standards, semantics, and just plain doing things right. But if you also share a desire to build great experiences for the users of the sites you work on, you may find these techniques useful when you just can’t start from scratch.

Most of us probably agree that the web is never really done. The real-time nature of the beast is what makes our medium unique, yet we often choose ‘File > New’ over a steady evolution of our sites. The truth is, we don’t always get to start over. And, as Kristopher Layon argues in Mobilizing Web Sites: Strategies for Mobile Web Implementation (Develop and Design), “doing something is better than doing nothing”.

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The Creative Bloq team is made up of a group of design fans, and has changed and evolved since Creative Bloq began back in 2012. The current website team consists of eight full-time members of staff: Editor Georgia Coggan, Deputy Editor Rosie Hilder, Ecommerce Editor Beren Neale, Senior News Editor Daniel Piper, Editor, Digital Art and 3D Ian Dean, Tech Reviews Editor Erlingur Einarsson and Ecommerce Writer Beth Nicholls and Staff Writer Natalie Fear, as well as a roster of freelancers from around the world. The 3D World and ImagineFX magazine teams also pitch in, ensuring that content from 3D World and ImagineFX is represented on Creative Bloq. 

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