A New Responsive Design for WordPress.com
Last week we started to roll out some visual changes to WordPress.com and the WordPress.com Reader. We’ve been working hard on improvements in two key areas; making WordPress.com an amazing responsive experience on your mobile device, and making sure we’re doing the best job highlighting all of the beautiful photos and videos you’re posting.
Use WordPress.com Anywhere
With more than one billion smartphones in service around the world, we want WordPress.com working and looking great on every single one of them. If you log in to WordPress.com, you’ll notice a new responsive design that works and fits wonderfully on your smartphone, tablet, or computer, regardless of the brand of your device or its screen size.
Checking your stats, writing new posts, reading the latest on Freshly Pressed, or checking in on notifications through your web browser are all now a more comfortable experiences on the go.
Beautiful Media
Some of the biggest updates have been around the WordPress.com Reader. You’ve all been posting some great photos on WordPress.com, and we wanted to do a better job making sure your followers can see them at the highest quality. If you use a featured image on your post, or you upload an image to your post that’s at least 595px wide or more, we’ll feature that image in full width above your post in the Reader.
Strong images really make your posts snap and stand out. We’ve loved seeing all of your featured images during testing, and we hope you’ll love it too. If you have smaller images in your posts, don’t worry, we’ll still show them embedded inside of your post in the Reader so your followers will never miss out.
We haven’t forgotten about videos and galleries! If there’s a video embed or a photo gallery in your post, we’ll feature it in the Reader above your post if possible. If you add a gallery to your post we’ll also tell your followers how many images are in the gallery and where to view them.
We’re working to bring even more great features to the Reader in the next couple of months, so keep an eye out for changes. Now, go grab your phone or tablet and check it out!
- January 17, 2013
- Dashboard, Features, Freshly Pressed, Photos
WordPress.com News 
I hope the dashboard gets a remodelling like that too!
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Does this explain all the recent – continuing – error messages like “connection to server has been dropped”?
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Please contact support if you are having issues getting connected to WordPress.com
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thank you!
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There’s no doubt it. The mobile explosion has yet to crest but visitors are accessing our blogs via mobiles and tablets is on the rise and affecting on blog design.
I have been “trying on” several responsive width themes and each one has features I like very much. I have used Twenty Eleven, Reddle and Twenty Twelve previously and have been testing Able, Blaskan and Sight recently. Currently I’m using Misty Lake and the feedback form my readers on all responsive width themes has been positive. There are now 60 responsive width WordPress.com Themes to select from. More themes are being added continuously and I’m eagerly looking forward to the expansion of the selection we have to choose from.
Hats off to WordPress.com Staff for all you do to help us showcase our content in beautiful responsive width themes that adjust to present our blog content well across all devices.
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Theme look nice and clean.
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Thanks for the info on attracting more visitors!
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I read and comment almost exclusively from mobile devices. Thank-you for always striving to integrate these technologies making it easier for us. 🙂
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I appreciate the hard work you’ve gone to to make WordPress a “new” experience, but please will you restore the black header at the top of the leader page when we first log in? I ask because without it, it is so much more frustrating and difficult to actually USE WordPress rather than READ it. Thank you.
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Let us know what you’re finding difficult. We’ve made some recent updates to restore a link to your blog admin pages in the account menu on the far right.
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Thanks Andy – what I find frustrating is that I used to be able to hover over my avatar which dropped down a menu that I could then go to whichever blog I wanted to use and then slide sideways to do whatever, usually adding a new post. I like the full control of the features of that way of adding new posts, I don’t like the slimmed down version that we get when we click “new post” on the new front page.
I’ve just tried it again after your comment and it’s a half-way improvement, thank you. At least I can find my way into the full-fat new post options now!! Thank you 🙂
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Great to see that WordPress is keeping up with, or even ahead of, evolving technology. When I get an iPad, in the not-to-distant future, I suspect I’ll transition to blogging almost entirely via iPad and/or iPhone.
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For a little while it was not showing the text previews under the blog posts. Seems to show at least a few lines once again now. I enjoy the text previews in the Reader and hope that is staying with this change.
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These aren’t going away, so let us know if they go missing for you again.
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Ok thanks! Will do. Appreciate the response.
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“Let us know what you’re finding difficult. We’ve made some recent updates to restore a link to your blog admin pages in the account menu on the far right.”
It is for example harder to go back to the own blog if you opened the reader or stats screen. The black header did allow it faster in my opinion. Now you need two click.. first on my blogs and then on the blog.
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Thanks for the feedback! You can hover over the account menu at the top right and click on your blog name to get straight to your blog admin area.
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WordPress needed a facelift-thanks!
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I mostly use my mobile. I’m afraid these new things don’t seem to work on my Nokia N8. Clicking on ‘Check it out’ I go to the page but it doesn’t load properly. That circular thing just keeps going round and round and loading stops right there.
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Unfortunately we can’t support Symbian phones because we don’t have any to test on. All modern mobile OS phone and tablet browsers should support the technologies needed.
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Um. No. These things are not really doing so well. (Samsung Galaxy II).
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Far from improving the display of photos in the reader, the new format displays portrait photos as thumbnails only (even high resolution ones), and photos in a gallery are omitted altogether, with no information that there is a photo there at all.
I hope this post means that these things will be fixed eventually…
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During testing we were finding that portrait photos were just too tall to feature. You could not see the entire photo on the screen, and it required a lot of scrolling causing confusion about where the post starts and ends. High quality landscape photos will always be featured. Photos in galleries should also always be featured. Please contact support and link us to some posts that are not working correctly, we’ll fix that up.
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Reblogged this on Picks and commented:
WordPress [gallery type=slideshow] is not too responsive to smart/small devices. The inconsistent bottom margin around the controls (caused by different image height?) may need some improvement. Anyway, I love using WordPress more and more each day.
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Thanks for the feedback. The galleries should be responsive too, we’ll take a look at this.
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Reblogged this on Peter H. Slutsky and commented:
#Baller!
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I’m having a hard time using WP now on my iPhone browser. I pretty much can’t do anything because it gets stuck trying to load my reader (which I never use). Anyway to fix that or work around it?
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All seems to be working on the iPhone (Safari and Chrome) here. Try clearing your browsing data under “Settings > Safari” and giving it another shot. If you continue to have issues please contact support and we’ll help you further.
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Thank you, I really like
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Hey WordPress, yesterday (?) you gave us advice on correct use of the semi-colon (which I considered to be a waste of time). But having done that in your Daily Post, what’s with the first para here!
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The hover on the account menu shows only one of my two blogs. When I am viewing the blog stats, I want that blog entry to be shown if both cannot be shown
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Any chance we could have a specific app for ipad/iphone JUST for WordPress.com Reader, or perhaps it could be accessed on other apps like Flipboard? As you might have guessed, when reading blogs, I like a ‘magazine’ effect!
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Reblogged this on maxoliver1242 and commented:
Good job World Press people
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New reader looks great and works fine 🙂
I did notice an initial issue the other day which was the blog admin link had gone but I see that is now back so everything fine for me.
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The only aspect I don’t like is that there isn’t an option available to not have a video show. Sometimes I post related videos at the end of my posts for those interested, and if I do that know, it shows that video instead of the featured image I’d prefer.
Glad you changed the freshly pressed page back to displaying multiple posts in a row. That was my only other complaint. Looks good!
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I think its a great modern RWD design, top dollar 🙂 Every site and application should be Responsive these days!
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Everythings good and cool….but I really would appreciate the return of my black header. The blue one is certainly not very nice.
Thanks.
😦
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Thanks a lot for helping us with mobiles and tablets. That is a satisfaction, as I usually use wordpress from my phone. But I am really sorry to say that I HATE the blue header. The black one was certainly better….if there was anthing I could do to change it back to the black one, I’d certainly like it. Everything else is awesome…and WordPress is indubitably the best blogging site.
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Thanks for the initiative you took in improving some of the features of wordpress. Job well done.
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Awesome! I’m not crazy about using my tablet to get on WordPress (like I am now) but this is encouraging, thanks!
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I dislike it, it’s changed the experience from Park Avenue to Howard Johnson’s. The reader order for a person is also out of order and difficult to determine which image goes with which printed material, goes with which title link to click. I like knowing where everything is on the dark -line link across my page. I liked having it across the top of everything, it aides in multitasking and tracking what I am doing.
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Good job for the improvements wordpress, from site’s remodeling to better themes . Looking forward for this. More power.
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Reblogged this on The Elements of Design and commented:
Keeping things fresh and up to date.
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good work…
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