Responsive vs. Mobile Websites: Which is Best for Your Business?

Just walking around Toronto, how many people can you see using some kind of mobile device?

It’s no secret that mobile use is becoming increasingly widespread. This also means that if you want your entire inbound marketing strategy to work, you need to ensure that your target market’s experience is not hampered by your website being incompatible to mobile devices.

In this arena, two competing formats can be considered: mobile versions or responsive design.

Mobile Vs. Responsive Design

Essentially, a mobile version of your website is a version specifically suited to mobile devices. When users access your website through desktop PCs, they’ll get the usual design. When they access it through mobile devices, they’ll get the mobile version.

That’s simple enough, but what about responsive design?
Responsive website design, in a nutshell, is a format of designing websites so they adapt to multiple screens, i.e. the website will be rendered perfectly regardless of whether it’s viewed through a desktop, a smartphone, or a tablet. Before the era of mobile Internet use, completely responsive design was difficult to achieve, but advances in HTML and CSS as well as a growing demand for mobile-friendly design has created a strong demand for it in recent years.

Well, let’s say you have a business here in Toronto and you want to build a website — you also have to ensure that it renders without errors in whatever device your target market wants to view it in; voila! Responsive web design is one answer. It allows you to maximize your inbound marketing and not lose traffic because of your website being incompatible to your users’ many devices.

Evidently, a single design that adapts to many devices may seem like an obvious choice — but hold your horses; there are limitations to responsive design.

Limitations of Responsive Design

Despite whatever style sheet mastery may be applied to your website design, a responsive version will never quite be adaptable to each and every screen possible. You can check your Google Analytics account and see what sort of mobile devices are being used to access your website. With enough traffic, you’ll see that your website is accessed by a lot of different devices, which means a lot of different browsers and a lot of different screen sizes.

Responsive design simply isn’t sufficiently all-inclusive to meet the needs of all these browsers and screen sizes and thus render your website correctly each time. There will be times when your website layout may be affected, or your image sizes won’t match. In fact, that’s another limitation to the flexible (pun intended) concept of responsive design: there will always be a minimum you design towards: any smaller than that and your UI and UX goes out the door.

The Bottom-Line

So does this mean mobile versions trump responsive design? Well, the attempt of responsive design to be the all-in-one solution is its own downfall, but it does work for a lot of websites, especially if you know what device the majority of your mobile users are using to access your website on-the-go. If you have a separate mobile version of your website, however, using responsive designbasically becomes moot.

Always go with the data. If your mobile traffic comes from a wide variety of devices, responsive design isn’t your best bet. Always consider UX -your entire inbound marketing effort is all about the consumer experience it provides.

Finally, consider the long haul — if you plan to employ responsive design at first and switch to mobile versions later on as your traffic increases and diversifies, choose mobile versions from the get-go.

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