I'm a happy user of VSD for myself and a few clients (I'm in semi-retirement) but I realise that my work is going to be seen increasingly on tablets and smartphones. With that in mind I find that my existing work (eg www.stpaulspeellh.co.uk or www.my-english-teacher.co.uk) work adequately on 10inch and 8 inch Apple and Samsung tablets but either don't show (St Pauls Peel) or are not really visible (My English Teacher) on my Nokia Lumia 920 Windows phone.

I've done some reading on the forum and have pretty well come to the conclusion that the move from VSD to RLM is substantial, demands a much more extensive knowledge of coding that I have (or frankly think I could manage at 71) but I'd appreciate others' view on that.

Finally, many of the potential sites I expect I might be working on involve links to pages on other, external sites and to full page pdfs hosted on my clients' own sites. I assume that unless the external pages have been constructed on a responsive platform they will not work responsively, and that pdf's will simply display as a single display scaled by the smartphone screen; is this correct?

Many thanks for your time.

Philip

I advice wait for upcoming Responsive Site Designer, in same time nothing wrong to dive into RLM and once RSD is out you can swim freely like a fish in the Responsive Site Designer.

David, If you want a jumpstart on RLM, I can help you convert your sites and provide the RLM project file for you. That way, you can learn by using RLM the already constructed site and not have to worry about struggling through the initial development. You can email me at support@usconsumernet.org.

I am a long time VSD user looking to simply update our site. We are photographers with an emphasis on wedding photography. Our site is mostly made up of slideshows accessed through an HTML link. Any images on our site are linked to these slideshows. The slideshows and images contained in them are hosted at another site. I just wanted to figure out how to add a slideshow with a music background and was looking around trying to find out how to accomplish this.

Reading in here and in the VSD forum it looks like they are replacing VSD with a Responsive designer and this sounds like a good idea and something I might want to consider as we have been talking about major site design changes and this would be a good time to head into the responsive area.

But, I'm a little confused. If I were to purchase the RLMP to design a responsive site it sounds like I'll need an HTML editor as well to get my website up on the net? And, when they come out with the Designer software will I need to purchase that as well as the RLMP and the HTML editor? By my calculations that would be almost $250.00 now and whatever the new designer will cost. Is this correct?

Linda

In my opinion Responsive Site Designer will be something alike Responsive Email Designer which recently released and I think RSD will be good for Static website creation at early stage and defiantly nobody can tells what features comes along with it, I can assume that we can not create dropdown Nav Menu and fully functional Form with it as CC has both separate application for that.

For slideshow I am not sure if it will covered but image and text base carousel is something that I am expecting.
and at early stage release lets say at version one I guess we will need external code editor for some extra tweak and that's my assumption without knowing anything what CC has to offer.

Final conclusion: we just have to wait and see.

You don't have to purchase HTML Editor. You can get RLMP and the free version of HTML Editor for $99 here:
http://www.coffeecup.com/free-editor/

Here are a few thoughts that you can consider to help you decide whether it's right for you to go ahead and start with RLMP now.

1. Cost: Another popular web design software company charges $240 per YEAR for the use of their software, so even if it costs a total of $250 one-time (the actual price of RSD has not been announced) to get CC's software (that does an incredible amount of stuff, I might add) is reasonable and less expensive. One of the nice things is that you can get RLMP now and RSD later so you don't have to lay out all the money at one time.

2. Urgency: It's important to convert your site to responsive as soon as possible. Again, this is just one factor, but it is important. I'm amazed at the amount of mobile traffic my clients' sites receive.

3. Learning Curve: When moving from traditional web design to responsive web design, there is definitely a learning curve. Waiting for RSD and then converting your site means that you are doing the conversion AND working through the learning curve at the same time. Getting RLMP now means you can work through the learning curve sooner so that using RSD will be that much easier later.

4. Work Redundancy: RSD will automatically import RLMP files. You will not have to recreate your site. The only part in which you may have to do a little extra work is just from the customizations you made in HTML Editor. However, I've found that RLMP will do nearly all the work needed for a web site, so, depending on how complicated your site is, you may not have much extra work at all when converting the site to RSD.

I hope that helps you in deciding whether to make the jump now or later.

$170 – $200 per year seems average for some popular WYSIWYG responsive site builders (for one small personal site, additional sites or ecommerce bumps the price up). These tend to be all-in-one packages; you pay a monthly fee for the software and hosting. If you're not happy with either and want to go with someone else, you lose your site and have to start over again.
The software Brian mentioned is available by cloud subscription, but has no limits on usage. You can create as many sites as you want and host where ever you want. There's no guarantee the price will remain at $20 a month.
At any rate, every year your site is live, you're paying over again for what would have been a one-time cost with RLMP or RSD.
(With RLMP files, you can use any text/html editor you want – free or paid.)

Choices, choices... Have a look around and figure out what suits you best.