![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/pg-image-host/thepg/screens/%5Bc17d4c4f766af152cba2ef660fc7eedb%5D_gss.png)
Global Software Survey Site Redesign
Convert an existing fixed-width site template to be responsive without changing the desktop version or losing existing browser compatibility.
May 17th, 2016
- Restructure template codebase
- Migrate to Jekyll
- Rewrite stylesheets with media queries and Flexbox
Lessons Learned: My theory at the time was that you could take any fixed-width stylesheet and strategically apply Flexbox as a progressive enhancement to make it responsive. However, responsive design is a lot simpler when you're working with mobile-first code. I was forced to reverse engineer a lot of the original code. It probably would have been easier if I was permitted to build a new a theme from scratch. In the end, though the desktop version was virtually indistinguishable from the original, under the hood, it was totally different. I even migrated to Jekyll to benefit from its dev server, templating, and asset handling.