Device-wide compatibility is not a competitive advantage for your website anymore. It is critical to its survival in the contemporary online market. Responsive web design lets you have a single website that optimally opens across devices of different screen-sizes to create a great user experience on all of these. This brings your efforts down to building just one website that looks equally well and creates a great user experience for all types of devices.
1.Website Domain: Having a responsive design implies that you can retain your original website domain and the only thing that changes is the code on the back-end.
2.A single URL: With a responsive design of your website, your users can easily find you with the same url without having to wait for any redirects. This is really important in case of slow connections.
3.Hassle-free SEO: Having a responsive design eliminates the need to create separate & specific content that is optimised to be perused on the mobile devices. This has a major advantage for your SEO too because you get to enjoy the advantages of the desktop website SEO on the mobile devices as well.
4.Ease of Marketing & Promotion: The use of a responsive web design also eliminates the need to put in extra marketing efforts, that would be otherwise required to promote the mobile website.
5.Low Costs: It goes without saying that maintaining single website is much more cost effective than having to maintain two for your business.
Mobile Website:
A mobile website is usually separately designed, keeping in mind specifically the mobile devices along with all the opportunities & challenges of using this platform. While developing a mobile website what matters the most is to take care of the small screen size, interaction methods (touch) and the limitation of the connectivity & speed. In addition to that, the mobile website in itself, needs to be a bit responsive in order to fit the mobile screens of all sizes and types.
1.Domain: When you opt for a mobile website, you must create a separate domain name for it. (A majority of businesses choose to differentiate theirs by “m.domain.com”).
2.Multiple URLs: When you opt for a mobile website, you must know that your customers will need to remember at least two URLs or will need to get redirected to the mobile website. This can take as long as several seconds.
3.Additional SEO Efforts: The mobile website will require you to make additional SEO efforts to get ranked on the search engines since your desktop website SEO will not be applicable in its case.
4.Maintenance: The biggest setback in case of having a separate mobile site is that you’re required to maintain two different websites which will require additional cost and efforts both.
5.Not Universally Compatible: Even if you get a mobile website for your business, it may not be compatible across all types of mobile devices. For example, the one you build for touch screen devices, may not optimally open with the keyboard navigation ones.
So, you must consider all these factors before taking your call on a responsive web design or mobile website for your business.