Where is responsive design?

[deeprootsmarketing]

Guys, I’m glad you’re pumping out new features and everything. Really, I know that the work you do, you do with excellence. I’m glad to see Themeco is full steam ahead.

But where, where, where, where, where, where, where is responsive design?

What. In. The. World?

I genuinely don’t understand how people are still getting along by hiding and showing duplicated sections based on breakpoints. Forget the SEO issues that duplicate content creates, the logistical maintenance of duplicate sections is just a nightmare. So you either duplicate sections and tweak them for different breakpoints, or you resort to custom code that requires you to handwrite and specify media queries for every single element you want to tweak.

This issue is a big enough issue that I left Pro over it in 2020, after asking you guys two different times over two different years about this: here in 2018 and here in 2020.

The response I got was nearly identical both times: “It’s been added to the issue tracker as a feature request.” How is responsive design a feature request? H-o-w??!!

I regularly come back and check the status reports and release notes, in hopes that it’ll finally become a priority somehow, and I continually find myself shocked to see that nobody seems to think responsive design matters at Themeco.

I was a raving fan of Pro, and had dozens of clients buy licenses over the years. I used it exclusively from January 2015 through December 2019. Then I moved to Webflow, because they understand that the web is responsive. Please, for the love of all things WordPress, go take a look at how Webflow implements responsive design, and then straight-up copy them. Please, please, please.

Honestly, I really don’t understand. Would really be grateful to hear from @kyle on this one. After asking the same question for three years, hearing another boilerplate response would make me sad inside. Just like the state of responsive design in Pro makes me sad inside.

[kyle]

Hi Phillip,

Responsive improvements were on the punch list for the Layout Builder cycle. As we got underway however, there were some items we needed to better address first in the tool so we could fully realize what we’d like to do on the feature.

And Webflow is a great product. If we had raised hundreds of millions I’m guessing we could have moved faster on some development priorities, but as we are a small business and bootstrapped from the beginning, we need to prioritize our time and resources. We’re certainly looking forward to having this feature in as it is one of the first ‘big’ features of this year.

[JvP]

@kyle

We’re certainly looking forward to having this feature in as it is one of the first ‘big’ features of this year.

Oh my, bring it on!

[deeprootsmarketing]

@kyle, I appreciate hearing back. Truly, I do.

I suppose I came off sounding insulting about Webflow, saying they understand the web is responsive. I’m sorry for that. I said it out of years of frustration, but it was mean-spirited, and that’s not cool.

I can appreciate that you guys deal with time constraints and resource limitations, etc., and I prefer rooting for the scrappy, bootstrapped company.

Where you guys lost me was when you kept deciding that being able to build responsively was not as important as other things. It has been literal years. I really don’t understand how surfacing dynamic content in the builders is a higher priority for anybody than having a responsive website.

But I’m not you, and I don’t have the customer feedback and business goals in front of me that you are operating from, so here we are.

I am encouraged to hear it’s the first big priority for this year, as I still actually use Pro when I build in WordPress.

Thanks for your time!