Why is the native aspect ratio important for a mobile responsive layout?

Recently, some of you may have noticed certain images on your website may have slightly changed their height or aspect ratio. This is due to a series of changes to several templates, as part of our mobile responsive update. In the vast majority of cases, these changes actually benefit the site, resulting in fewer distorted images, as well as allowing our mobile responsive code to properly scale images to mobile screens.

However in certain cases, such as when images have been slightly stretched or distorted to fit to exact dimensions, the update has caused some issues. Currently, you won’t be able to edit the height of images in widgets in the Content Editor. Changes you make to the height in the editor will show up only in the editor (because the content editor doesn’t use the responsive code that your live site does). On your live site, your images will only display in their native aspect ratio.

Example: If an image is 200 pixels wide, and 125 pixels tall, but you’ve set the height to 200 pixels in the content editor, it will be stretched into a square, but on your live site, it will display only at the original aspect ratio.

Overall, this is good for everyone, as images will no longer be squashed, and will look great on all devices and screen sizes. If you feel that your site benefits from your images being in an exact aspect ratio, you can achieve this by downloading the image file, cropping it to the dimensions you want using your editor of choice, and replacing it in your custom content widget. In the future, we’ll be releasing updates to the content editor and file manager that will allow you to work with images in a more intuitive manner. Until then, our staff is at work making sure that this issue affects the fewest possible users, but if you would any help regarding this issue, our customer support staff is ready to help you at 1 (866) 645-7700, or at support@ihouseweb.com.