Ideas for a New Mobile Design

Does anyone have any favorite mobile tech sites they want me to look at while I'm considering the next phase of mobile redesign?

My idea is to build a new mobile design without using any forum framework (do not use vBulletin, XenForo, etc.) and do not use any big SPA Javascript frameworks (do not use Angular, Vue, React), and not to use any cookie-cutter CMS (no WordPress, Joomla, etc.). These cookie-cutter frameworks seem so boring.

So my initial idea is to use the basics:

  • HTML5
  • CSS5
  • Javascript
  • Bootstrap
  • Font Awesome

and avoid like the plague (do not use):

  • vBulletin, XenForo, Inversion, or any forum package.
  • WordPress, Joomla, etc.
  • Angular, React, Vue, etc.

The reasons for this is that we have a perfectly good DB already and the back end is not really public facing, so there is no reason to worry about the back end.

As far as the UI, there is nothing really interesting to be gained by cookie-cutter CMS and my experience this year with Vue (big JS SPA frameworks) was that

  1. ...it is not SEO friendly,
  2. ...it is hard to debug,
  3. ...does not provide anything we cannot do with plain-vanilla Javascript,
  4. ...is constantly changing so too much time is spent managing the framework versus writing new features,
  5. ...adds an unnecessary layer of complexity.

So, the new mobile design would be mainly just writing some JSON AJAX queries and displaying some nice mobile UI, with responsive modules which can go "anywhere on the site" , maybe with infinite scrolling and some bare-bones JS libs.

I thought I would design a new home page for mobile first; and the move on from there. I'm just not keen on "frameworks" these days, I guess. I enjoyed building the UserCP with VueJS, but I would not do it again if I had to do it over again. The more experience I have will full-stack web development, the more I am disappointed with "frameworks" and cookie-cutter CMS software.

My idea is "everything is a responsive UI module"; and "no dependance on frameworks".

Any ideas or suggestions ?

(please don't suggest any forum packages or CMS-like frameworks)

3 Likes

Using below would be good enough even. If there is possibilities you can avoid Font Awesome, for improved better TTFB, you probably noticed in google's PageSpeed Insights :

HTML5
CSS5
Javascript
Bootstrap
Font Awesome - ?

How We Boosted Page Load Speed By 58%

Font Awesome vs Google Fonts | What are the differences?

I have not noticed, when viewing unix.com, any notable slowdown our our use of Font Awesome.

In fact, when I just checked, it shows the FA fonts cached in memory, with 0 additional delay.

I am guessing that those guys in that report you cited Akskay had their browser caching disabled in dev tools.

We use both Google Fonts and FA and I have never noticed any delay greater or less, then either one (after caching), so far. Of course, the initial loading will be faster depending on the CDN used and how those fonts are loaded, initially. If the Google CDN is faster than the FA CDN, that might be a factor in in initial load; but on the other hand, my experience is that networks change all the time (speed, performance), so drawing conclusions about loading time, can be very deceptive.

More importantly, is the caching, and after initial load, FB and Google Fonts (we use both) are cached in browser memory, and so are both very fast.