If you’ve got a website, your main wish should be to give visitors the best experience possible that will lead to some kind of call to action. Sharing, contacting and linking are just some of the best actions that website owners want to induce, and these are only achievable if a site is designed to accommodate a variety of entrants.
There’s a couple of ways to ensure your site is ready to give users the best darn UX possible: by making an additional site for mobiles, or by designing your existing site to be responsive. Both options, mobile and responsive, offer users a quicker, straightforward and effortless approach, however, which one wins when it comes to a solution that works the best?
Below are some pros and cons regarding multi-platform solutions. If you’re hoping to find a friendly web design agency who’d love to tell you more, the TKStarley team are just a quick click away!
What will the user experience via a mobile site?
As mobile websites are designed to replicate your main site it will be down to the server to present a page that has been shrunk in order to fit the size of a mobile device or platform. This experience is just for mobile users and can make for an affordable alternative when compared to its responsive counterpart.
And how about the UX on a responsive design website?
Rather than the server doing the donkey work in resizing a page, it’s the device that adjusts its own properties in order to accommodate what it finds on a website. Switching between landscape and portrait views whilst adjusting smaller or larger images are just a couple of the benefits that provide a flexible and seamless solution when it comes to responsive design.
Will your domain name be protected?
As mobile websites require a separate domain to be created in order to facilitate visitors this can be somewhat detrimental to organic SEO and also amounts to double the amount of time needed to keep both sites updated and current.
Thanks to a cheeky bit of back-end coding, responsive sites are capable of giving your domain all the kudos it deserves as nothing really changes in terms of both the user and the search engine experience. Also, you only have to maintain one site and can cross the need for redirects, extra content and canonical conundrums off your digital to-do list.
How will your link building assets be affected?
Getting as much high-quality link juice as possible is one way to increase your organic rankings as well as extending your equity when it comes to sharing content. The reason why mobile sites don’t incorporate search links is because they use a different domain to your actual website.
As responsive web design uses your main website as its only domain, it allows your link assets to be preserved making it a much more attractive option if you’re hoping to climb the organic rankings.
Is your site flexible for future upgrades?
With ‘next generation’ this and ‘future funky’ that arriving any minute now by digital ninja courier, it’s no wonder that you want your website to be able to keep up.
Mobile sites often need to be redeveloped and redesigned in order to be compatible with the latest phones and browser platforms. This is not only time consuming, it can be expensive which can add up to more money being spent in the long term.
As responsive design technology is able to adapt to new devices without the need for any more programming it makes for a far healthier financial strategy.
Summing up the pros and cons of mobile and responsive website designs
*In a nutshell: *responsive wins – yay!
*Why? *
Because Google says so.
You want more reasons?
Responsive website designs present a more cost-efficient financial strategy in the long term as well as boosting SEO and saving you time, energy and stress in the process.
More about the author: Chris Owen is a freelance copywriter specialising in digital marketing and creative content.