After seven years on the old fixed-width design, I rebuilt holas.pl from scratch in 2015 with a fully responsive WordPress theme.

The core change was architectural: replacing two separate templates (desktop layout + mobile skin served via user-agent detection) with a single fluid codebase. One theme, one stylesheet, all screen sizes handled through CSS media queries. The mobile skin approach had worked in 2008, but by 2015 it had become a maintenance liability — any content or style change needed to be applied twice, and the growing variety of device sizes made the binary desktop/mobile split increasingly inadequate.

holas.pl — new responsive design

The theme was custom-built on WordPress — PHP templates following the WP template hierarchy, CSS compiled from SCSS, fluid grid with breakpoints covering mobile, tablet, and desktop. At the time I also moved the site to a new server: a Banana Pi running Debian 24/7 — a story documented separately.

The responsive rebuild worked well and the design held up for several years. But working with WordPress increasingly meant fighting its abstractions rather than building with them — the plugin ecosystem, the PHP templating constraints, the deployment story. Eventually I replaced WordPress entirely with a custom Symfony application generating static HTML. That story starts in 17 Years of WordPress — Why I Finally Quit.