By Gaurav Pradhan
Nowadays with different shapes of screens coming into picture due to advent of tablets, netbooks and mobiles, designing the websites has become more important. If they don’t work properly on all screens, then it may lead to a small number of desktop viewers and missing out of potential customers who are using small screens, always on the go.
Responsive design, which helps the website which delivers the same HTML code or CSS code, adjusting itself to the monitor, serving both desktop and mobile formats with the same codebase. The biggest advantage of this design is that you don’t have to have different codes for different screens and you don’t need to maintain it.
But the major disadvantage of this design is that it will have the same complexity and size as the desktop version. This may lead to slow loading of pages in smaller screens, affecting user experience, because of downloading of irrelevant information of the pages on the small screen.
There is another way of taking websites outside the desktops and into smaller screens is Adaptive Design. It serves the same purpose as with Responsive design, but it happens in a different way. For the website to become adaptive, the changes are made right from the start while making the website, during the server hosting which detects the devices which make requests to view it. By detecting the devices specifications, it responds back with different HTML and CSS codes for the designated screen. It can be concluded that Adaptive design was conceptualized to protect the specific intent of the mobile consumer.
But apart from the design, Functionality of a website is the key. A website should have a goal of ensuring its online presence being accessed by any device without compromising on the website experience. Responsive design considers the different screen sizes and optimizes the user experience by showing relevant and useful aspects of the website, displaying it on the small screens. But there needs to be careful consideration of the website before transforming it into an Adaptive one, because this is an irreversible change having long term side effects.
Both methods, Responsive & Adaptive, address the same issue of delivering user experience, irrespective of screen sizes. But this transformation should not be done compromising on the content and layout of the website.
(Author is a Management student of IIM Bangalore having an experience in Manufacturing Industry, Follow On Twitter @GauravToYou)
What #WebDesign is right for your #website – http://t.co/49O4WnQvf2 #Webdevelopment #webservices #responsive #adaptive #seo #content
— Social Media Trend (@SocialMTrndInd) October 20, 2014
Also Read
6 Easy Steps on How to create your own website – Social Media Trend – https://www.socialmediatrend.in/website/6-easy-steps-on-how-to-create-your-own-website/
What The Heck is Responsive Web Design ? – John Polacek – http://johnpolacek.github.io/scrolldeck.js/decks/responsive/
