When converting a large website to a responsive site, what sort of challenges or guidelines would you suggest looking out for?

Today, a website must not look good only on a desktop screen, but also on tablets and smartphones. A website is responsive if it is able to adapt to the screen of the client. To easily make a website responsive, you should take care of these three easy steps:

1 – The layout

When building a responsive website, or making responsive an existing site, the first element to look at is the layout. Start by creating a non-responsive layout, fixed at the default size. Then add media queries and necessary changes to your code to make the code responsive. 

2 – Medias

A responsive layout is the first step to a fully responsive website. Now, let’s focus on a very important aspect of a modern website: medias, such as videos or images. Refine your CSS code to ensure that your images will never be bigger than their parent container. It’s super simple and it works for most websites. 

3 – Typography

A responsive website should have a responsive font.  Indeed, a responsive font size should be related to its parent container width, so it can adapt to the screen of the client.

Ref. http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/making-a-website-responsive-in-3-easy-steps

Usually when you host a website you will make sure its user friendly and compatible with most of the browsers. You might have also make sure it on a good servers which responds with a group member servers and you also use firewalls.

But to improve the speed or the connectivity and availability use reverse proxy and Network hardware load balancers.

Its a transformation in terms of user experience. Hence prioritization may fall on improving user interface, efficient data validations, browser compatibilities, device compatibilities (mobile/laptop/desktop), ease of use, ease of portability of code to other technologies (business continuity purposes) and availability factors (security purposes).It is recommended to analyse change in technology, prior to requirement gathering or designing phase.