What is Responsive Design?

10 years ago, that smartphones and tablets were not in the market, responsive design was not an issue. By increasing the number of people using smartphones and tablets, responsive design for all the websites became more crucial and nowadays, a non-responsive website may lose more than 60% of their visitors because of this weakness.

At the beginning, companies tried to build a parallel mobile version website for their visitors from smartphones and later they built a software for their visitors to access their contents through that. Experiences showed that this method was not popular among the people and users preferred to visit the original website instead.

In Responsive design method the story is different. When a user visits a responsive website with a desktop or laptop, he can see all the contents and details. Once his screen becomes smaller, non-necessary parts of the website will become hidden but important contents will be displayed to them with a suitable appearance.

Future of the Website Design

Not only responsive design would update your website for the devices of this market, but also it prepares your website to be adaptable to any new technology or screen size. Nobody knows which screen sizes will come to the market in future. Even there is a possibility to have new standards for display dimensions and we should be equipped for that.

Creating an independent software needs continuous updates to be synched to the new versions of the operating systems. However, by applying responsive design on your website, its appearance automatically modifies itself. In other words, a responsive designed website adjust itself to a screen size regardless of the operating systems.

Effect of Responsive Design on SEO

Responsive design method would make the search engines to investigate into your website contents easier. In this case, you don’t need to duplicate your contents for different versions and that would be effective for your website SEO as there is no repeated content on your website. for more information follow our Learn SEO Articles.

Noticeably, smartphones are becoming more and more popular among the people and they are being produced in different sizes and screens. As a result, appropriate display and appearance of your website on their screen will satisfy users regardless of the size of their devices. Moreover, considering new Google algorithms, the “Mobile Friendly Websites” are more likely to get a better rank in Google.

These 2 reasons caused web designers to consider the importance of the responsive design and customers to request for such a design for their websites.

Examining the appearance of websites in different sizes

If you want to evaluate your website in terms of Responsive Design standards, you can go to “Mobile Friendly Test” website and enter your domain URL to check it out.

You spend time and money to attract visitors to your website via SEO or advertisements. All of these efforts may become useless if you don’t consider responsive design method in your website.

statistics show that smartphones and tablets are becoming more popular among people day by day. Therefore, by neglecting “Responsive Design”, you are going to face a problem in near future.

Responsive Design VS Mobile version

Surfing on the internet by smartphones requires data accessibility and fast loading pages.

In responsive web design, users don’t need to zoom on a particular part of a website because that part is already modified to their screen size. In responsive design, you may need to remove some parts of the website accordingly. As an example, when someone is using his smartphone vertically, sidebar will not be displayed to him and it is better to show him only the main contents. Also, the font size should be larger so it can be read easier.

By utilizing Responsive Design method and applying correct CSS orders, your visitors will have a decent experience of your website regardless of what device they are using. In fact, you do not need to build a mobile version or software of your website anymore.

Responsive Design VS Adaptive Design

Unlike responsive design, adaptive design doesn’t use a same page structure for different dimensions, instead, it designs different structures for different predictable dimensions which will be displayed on different screen sizes.

Generally, a designer would design a website for desktop, tablet and mobile screens. When a user visits a website, based on his screen size, the page structure to be displayed would be decided automatically.  In adaptive design, instead of percentage, pixels and constant dimensions are being used. This technique is incredibly efficient in “Company Web Design”.

for Web Design Companies in Dubai and UAE, “Adaptive Design” hasn’t been applied that much and it wasn’t attractive to the people of this region. Although both techniques are optimizing the mobile display of a website, they do it in an entirely different way.

1- “Responsive Design” is Difficult and Time-taking

If you choose the responsive design, you will have a more difficult work to do. Because creating single structure and making sure that it is going to be displayed correctly in all different dimensions need an accurate coding and applying complicated CSS orders. In opposite, in adaptive design, you will simply create 3 or 4 structures for your website, and you can use classification for each one of them.

2- “Adaptive Design” Would Cover Less Area

In adaptive method, you design 3 or 4 structure maximum, however nowadays, there are different kinds of smartphones in terms of dimensions and there are new screen sizes coming to the market every day. When the screen size differs from the design size, the possibility of an incorrect presentation of websites increases. Contrary, responsive design would be effective in any dimensions and by having new screen sizes in the market, new coding and structures are not required.

3- “Responsive Design” Would Increase the Loading Speed

In adaptive design, different structures will be loaded and investigated once a user enter the website, but in responsive design there is only one structure to be loaded. Usually file style is heavier in responsive design and loading time is higher in adaptive design in opposite. As a result, for websites with more pages, responsive design lead to have a faster website and for website with pages fewer than 20, adaptive design would be more efficient. In ecommerce websites, loading time becomes crucial as it has so many pages.

Combining Both Techniques to Design

Each of these techniques have their advantages and weaknesses. The most efficient method is to combine both methods and use their advantages. In responsive design, some parts like creating the “Menu” would be very difficult because their appearances would be completely different in various dimensions. Contrary, in pages with contents, there won’t be big changes in a page with different dimensions however we have to create different structures for that in adaptive design.

The best method is to use “Responsive Design” in general, but to use “Adaptive Design” for some parts of the website such as menu, header and footer. By doing this, we are using the advantages of the both techniques.