Today more people are using mobile devices to view content. This trend is only going to increase as time moves forward and smartphones continue to get better. The question a lot of businesses are asking them selves is do they need a responsive website or an adaptive website. A responsive website is a site that reformat to fit on any device (computer, tablet, smartphone). An adaptive website uses multiple HTML versions of a website to display on each type of device. The choice is hard for some businesses to make due to the similarities in displaying information.
The main things to consider when deciding on which format to use are:
- How much content do you have on your website
- Do your visitors view a lot your content on mobile devices
- What is the most important content on your website
Why Choose Responsive Web Design
A company would choose a responsive web design because that they have a lot of important content on their website. To get the most out of this style website the navigation for the website should be simple and easy as possible to navigate. This is to make sure when the website is being viewed on a smartphone it can be hard to use pull down menus, call to actions, and mega menus. This means any viewer should be able to get to important content in 2-3 clicks.
Another reason for a company to choose a responsive website is to make it easier on the web designer. With only having to design one website it makes it a lot easier. The down fall of this is the when viewing the website it make be seem less optimized then viewing from other devices.
The main reasons for choosing a responsive website:
- Having a lot of important content on a website
- Easy to navigate website
- Easier on web designers to design
Why Choose Adaptive Web Design
Adaptive Websites is little dated compared to responsive websites. This does not mean that adaptive design is out dated, in fact it still has a lot of uses today. The most useful time to an adaptive design is when a designer has a specific mobile experience in mind. This works best when there is a short message(s) that need to be conveyed. Think an event where someone on their phone only needs to know a brief about the event, location, time, and date. While someone viewing on the computer would like more information about the event.
An Adaptive website also helps with a website that does not have a lot important content. This makes it easy for someone to view all the content on any device.
The main reasons for choosing an adaptive website:
- Wanting a unique mobile experience
- Needing different experiences for each device for different users
- Have less important content
Conclusion
All and all it is simpler then people may think to choose between a responsive web design and adaptive web design. The main choices to make is what experience do you want to have on each device. If you want to have a specific experience for mobile devices then an adaptive design is something to look at. If you want to have a more uniform experience on all devices then a responsive design is something you need to look into.
