Responsive web design with server-side components, RESS or commonly known responsive design has been around for some years now. From its birth in the mid 2000’s to its first coming out party in 2010, we have watched its development with enthusiasm and some justifiable anxiety. As time allowed, we have attempted to the best of our ability to implement parts of it that we found accessible and financially viable for our customers.

Our first client request for a fully responsive design was in 2011. This client was a hip commerce site owner, and had just read about responsive design. Our client was very eager to implement it. After lengthy discussions and data wrangling, we convinced her that the commerce portion of her site did not need to be fully responsive.
We created a separate design for phones, one for iPads, and cleaned up her desktop design. The process was illuminating and provided us with some ground rules and guidelines. Those guidelines have come in handy over the last few years.
Every web designer has heard the siren song of Graceful Degradation or Progressive Enhancement. Graceful Degradation starts with your site as it is displayed on the desktop, and then attempts to morph it down to the tablet and phone browsing experience. With progressive enhancement, you put your best foot forward on the mobile platform, providing the users with minimal screen real estate, processing power and third party plug-ins. This produces an amazing experience that both looks great and functions perfectly, and subsequently proceeds to expand that in to a design for Tablet and Desktop.
Although this is true, based on our experience with in-house, and contract designers, the Progressive Enhancement concept is not truly understood by the majority. Most designers are very happy to provide an AMAZING USER EXPERIENCE, but somehow loses track of the AMAZING FUNCTIONALITY part of the equation.