OSTraining.com's New Responsive Design

July 7, 2014 - The year was 2008. Twitter had eight employees. Myspace earned $800 million. Facebook had a mere 100 million users. Instagram would not hit the scene for another two years.

The first version of OSTraining.com launched in 2008 and ever since, the company has taken small steps in improving its design. 6 years after launch, the OSTraining team has abandoned small steps and launched a radical, 180-degree update.

OSTraining's Framework and Base Template
OSTraining chose a commercially available template to facilitate building and iteration: the Warp 7 framework from YooTheme.com with Lava as a base template.

Warp 7 uses UIKit – a front-end framework that works as an alternative to Twitter Bootstrap – which gives it a significant advantage over other choices. Initially, the site was slower due to the increased size of the codebase, but that was a short-term issue. The new site must be responsive and they won't settle for less.

The Font
OSTraining selected Open Sans, a lightweight font from Google that was designed primarily to be readable. This font is common across the Internet – and used by WordPress.com – because it is "optimized for legibility across print, web and mobile interfaces."

The Color Scheme
The new site's color scheme is based on the OSTraining redesign by Chiara Aliotta from untilsunday.it.

Mobile
Adding mobile compatibility was exceptionally tricky. The solution was reached by reducing the number of third-party, public-facing extensions, and through CSS media queries that adjust width, display and other properties.

What's Next
"Good enough" is never good enough for OSTraining.

They've already begun tweaking the new site:

Adding extra features to the video class pages

Making their most popular posts more responsive.

Placing the entire site behind an SSL certificate to increase customer security.

At OSTraining, everything is done with your ease-of-use in mind.

Get your career in gear with OSTraining's online training videos – now available on your mobile devices – by clicking here: https://www.ostraining.com/pricing/