RWD on The Big Web Show 15 years ago

July 7, 2025

Fifteen years ago today, I listened to Ethan Marcotte talk about this idea of “responsive web design” on The Big Web Show. I had read Ethan’s article on A List Apart a month earlier. But it did not make that big an impression on me at first. There was something about hearing him talk about it and the conversation with Jeffrey Zeldman and Dan Benjamin that made a much bigger impression. I had a sense that day that this approach to building websites was going to become the way we did things going forward.

I remember that it made me feel uncomfortable. New ideas often do that. I was both excited and uncomfortable. I was not one who had embraced the fluidity of the Web. I liked fixed-width layouts. There was much more control. Embracing fluidity was scary. It was embracing the unknown. But I knew that day listening to the podcast that I needed to embrace it. I knew that it was the way forward in our industry.

It would be another year before I tried responsive layout for myself. Ethan’s book had come out in June and I consumed it in a day. There was so much practical advice that I felt empowered to try it for myself. I used the approach in a personal project that I built. It would be another year before I built my first responsive layout for a professional project. I was asked to retrofit the Working Mother site for Bonnier Corporation where I worked.

About two and a half years after I heard that podcast, I started regularly building responsive sites when I went to work with Aaron Gustafson at Easy Designs. I learned a lot by building a mixture of projects that included responsive retrofits to from scratch site builds. One of my favorites was a retrofit I did for the Web Standards Sherpa site.

I can’t think of another idea or approach that has had such a huge impact on the Web industry as responsive web design. I am glad that I got to hear Ethan talk about it on that podcast that I listened to fifteen years ago. I am glad that I embraced the idea early on and had the opportunities I did at Easy Designs to build a solid foundation that I continue to build upon today.

My writings about responsive web design

• Front-End Design Conference 2011 (2011) – I got to hear Ethan speak about responsive web design and share a sneek peak at the Boston Globe project, which was one of the sites outside of personal blogs to use responsive web design in its approach. I also enjoyed getting to interact with Ethan at the conference after-party.
• Adventures in Responsive Websites (Lessons from the Workshop) (2012) – I shared lessons that I learned from my first professional responsive web site project
• Web Standards Sherpa : A Case Study (2014) – A case study about a responsive retrofit
• Responsive Design: Five Years Later (2015) – I share more of the story of my early evolution into building responsive web sites
• Responsive Web Design in my article, A Decade of Development: 2010 to 2019 (2019) – Another version of my responsive web design story
• Responsive Web Design in my article, Happy Birthday CSS (and me) (2021)
• Container Queries (2022) – I was so excited when container queries made it into browsers in 2022. It was the next natural step into creating responsive sites and building layouts that responded to parent containers instead of just the browser window.

Some articles by Ethan

• Responsive web design turns fifteen. (2025) – A shorter reflection by Ethan
• Responsive web design turns ten. (2020) – A bit longer reflection by Ethan
• Responsive web design (2010) – The original A List Apart article