The term “responsive web development or design” gets thrown around a lot these days. But what does it really mean and is it important to you and your business.
So let's start with a quick definition of both to help clear some confusion before we get into more detail.
Responsive Design: is a fluid or adaptive design that adapts to the width of the browser window or device. This creates the same a user experience across devices.
Mobile Design: this is basically a second website usually on a subdomain like m.yourdomain.com. This is the old way of looking at things, by creating a completely different design that's only accessible by a mobile or a tablet. You choose to recreate (or have it automatically recreated) the content onto this site and have things like images and extras stripped out.
Now that's hopefully cleared some of the confusion. So let's take a closer look at these.
Responsive Design
Creating a unified experience for your users means consistency and this allows users to be able to quickly find what they are looking for on your website across all their devices. With content and layout being controlled across the devices based in some simple styling rules you can rest easy knowing you only need to maintain that one website.
Responsive design has many advantages over mobile design.
- Unified user experience, meaning same experience on all devices for all users
- Ease of updating, update one website and choose how content is to be displayed on certain devices through preset styling rules and classes
- Cost effective, the costs of developing 2 website templates can add up, by using a responsive design you can get both layouts in one template
Mobile design
Mobile design can be good as you can target users who are using smaller screens or are limited to data speeds of 3G or 4G mobile networks. As stated above this is where you would develop and maintain a whole separate site. Content from your main site is then duplicated to the mobile version and pages and images that aren’t needed are then removed.
This has both some advantages and disadvantages. However in today's world I think there disadvantages outweigh its advantages.
- Inefficient, with every page made or content update you have to remember to update both desktop and mobile version
- Costly, as well as being inefficient they can cost a lot more to design as you have not just one site but now two
- Different user experience, being a different template it also means that users are presented with a different layout and style from your main website, this can hinder or change the way these users interact with your site and find your services.
So in the end you can see that a responsive design is one that will allow you to have better control, provide a seamless user experience and have a lower cost for your business.
So Responsiveness, isn’t it important?
