General

Websites are dynamic. A website that only looks good on a 1200 x 900 screen is a failure. The Big Bob theme was designed so that users could set up a great looking website that continues to look great across a diverse array of platforms. It was designed so that content managers would be able to minimize the amount of time and consideration they would have to give to cross platform compatibility. Having said that, there are things that a content manager can do to enhance the uniqueness and excitement user experiences when users choose different platforms.

Main Background Image

UPDATE

The Big Bob Theme has substantially improved control options for the main background image for mobile compatibility. Full screen mobile friendly background images are now an option. Please check the customizer and read through all the background image directions. The controls are slightly more complicated than I would like because I had to preserve backwards compatibility, but I think if you take the time to learn how to use them then you’ll love the results you can achieve, especially on mobile platforms.

4/15/21

Keeping your main background image underneath all of your pages using traditional design methodology can create some pretty cool effects, but it can also make content creation convoluted. When you start adding pages of increasing length, you’ll notice that mobile applications will probably interpret a traditional main background image in some imperfect ways. The Big Bob theme gives the option of using a main background image as a copy for all of your feed pages, like your posts page. The copy is centered onto your screen like a featured image, so you can turn off your main background image and use a solid color for the background while maintaining a featured image or video on top of the solid color background of every page. Featured images and videos have been designed for their ability to adapt well to whatever device they are viewed on.

If you choose to keep the main background image in the traditional form, it should be chosen for its versatility. It should look good behind a large spectrum of images and text. It should probably be set to a fixed position with the recognition that some browsers may turn off the fixed positioning, so it should still look good when it scrolls. When considering scrolling background images, vertically aligned is usually more versatile than horizontally aligned, but the background image’s color scheme is the most important consideration. You can read more about background image options here.

Featured Video and Images

UPDATE

There are many more options for setting images and videos into the backgrounds of individual pages, and the new options have been designed with user friendliness in mind. You can check them out here.

4/15/21

Don’t just choose horizontally aligned videos and images. There are lots of great vertically aligned videos and images out there, and they tend to play well on phones. There are also great square images too. Depending on the screen being used, the featured video or image may take up the majority of the background screen space, or it may serve as a focal image or video with the main background image taking up the majority of the screen. The more you diversify the alignment of your images and videos, the more you will diversify user experiences across different platforms and keep things fresh and interesting.

Blog Posts Page

The Big Bob theme will set all of the blog posts on the posts page as excerpts. If you used a featured image, it will be added automatically along with the opening of the blog text, so the work is already done for you. You can also use your featured video as your excerpt by adding the HTML you created for the video into the “Excerpt” section under the “Document” tab. If you want to add any text, you can add that as well.

But don’t put too many posts on one page. Ten per page is a good rule of thumb. You don’t want to slow down how long it takes the page to load. If you want to create a longer list of posts for people to choose from, then you can use the recent posts widget in the sidebar.

Now if you’re experienced with mobile browsers, you’re probably aware that some of them like to turn off the background image, and a background image stretched ten posts high probably wouldn’t look so great. But you don’t have to worry about that with the Big Bob theme. On the posts page, the Big Bob theme automatically takes the background image and makes a copy of it, then lays the copy over the top of the main background image into the featured image position.