Fighting Online Response

Your visitors don’t give a crappola if your site is responsive. They don’t care if it’s a separate mobile site. They don’t care if it’s just a plain old desktop site. They do give care if they can’t get done what they need to get done. They do care when your site takes 20 seconds to load. They do care when interactions are awkward and broken.

The talk about responsive design is about the readjustment of layout. We’re concerned with creating a good user experience and achieving content parity, regardless of technique. Yes we should be thinking flexibly. Yes we can use the principles of responsive design to achieve this. But we’re not using those techniques for the hell of it. We’re using them to take the experience to the next level.

And just because we’re utilizing those techniques doesn’t mean that we can’t also use server-side and other techniques to adapt the experience. There’s a lot of different ways to create great experiences, and it’s worth exploring anything and everything that can help get us closer to our goals. We don’t need to limit ourselves to media queries.