Stylesheet not loading. Why?

[sfatula]

So, the very first time I go to a newly installed site, with no real data, just installed and working otherwise, it looks wrong from an iPad Air 2 or an iPhone 5s. In both cases, it's formatted really weird, 3 search boxes, sort of vertical, etc. I have attached a picture, does not matter if it's portrait or landscape.

However, if I click on a link, home. whatever, from then on, it looks what I would assume would be correct. It's only the very first time you would see the page.

Is that normal for a mobile device? No way around it?

[lat9]

This is a shot-in-the-dark: Is the site set up to be accessed as www.example.com or example.com within your configure.php files? When you go to the site "the very first time", are you including the www. or not?

[sfatula]

Definitely including www. So, you are saying is you clear all site history in your browser, the first time you go to your responsive site, it displays correctly?

[lat9]

Nope, I was just guessing that there was some difference between an access with the www. and one without.

[DrByte]

I link to the site would help us help you better.

[sfatula]

It's on a private network for development. No external access. I think I should have posted in the responsive design support thread for this theme, so, have done so. This can be closed if possible.

[DrByte]

lat9's suggestion is quite relevant. The logic comes from experience where there are multiple URLs to get to a site, and the first visit doesn't completely match, but after clicking a link (which is generated by the site itself, not typed into the browser potentially incorrectly) things work properly and consistently.

A common case is the mismatch of domain prefixes, as lat9 mentioned.

Another common case is using a https:// URL when there's no SSL/https configured on the server.

Since you can't share a URL, you'll need to investigate yourself why things aren't loading properly. Using the development tools provided by your browser should help you isolate the cause. Look at the errors the browser has logged, and the response-codes for each asset it attempted to load (200 is good, even 300, 301, 30X are good, but 400's (403, 404, etc) and 500's are bad).