You have perhaps heard people saying that we are now living in a post PC world. Do you know what it actually means for a web development company? It means that we are living in a world where thirty to fifty percent website traffic is coming from the mobile devices and that in the near future very few people will be using laptops and desktops for browsing the Internet.
We have moved into an era where adaptive and responsive design will rule the web. In fact, the W3C has termed this trend as a ‘one web approach’. And nowadays, most of the web developers are adopting this same approach to:
- make websites work flawlessly on tablets and smartphones
- make websites future-ready so that it works error-free irrespective of screen size and resolutions of any future device
The different kinds of design approaches used by website development companies mainly include server-side adaptive design, client-side adaptive design and responsive design. Web developers need to choose any one of the 3 kinds for building a website.
In order to make it easy for the web developers to choose the best approach for their next web development project, we have discussed here the strengths and weaknesses of each of these approaches separately.
- Server-Side Adaptive Approach
Strength: Achieving server-side approach becomes possible for a professional web development company either through custom user agent detection or through server-side plugins. This approach consists of providing unique templates for different devices allowing more customization. It keeps the device detection logic on server letting the mobile web pages to load quickly.
Weakness: This approach is not meant for the faint-hearted. It needs substantial changes to be done in the back-end. The requirement of managing multiple templates raises the ongoing maintenance cost as well. The approach may also face performance issues when the servers are heavily loaded.
- Client-Side Adaptive Approach
Strength: If a website development company adopts a client-side adaptive approach, it doesn’t need to rebuild the site from scratch. Instead, it can develop the site with the existing content while delivering a layout, which is mobile-responsive. This approach allows expert web developers to specifically target particular screen resolutions or devices.
Weakness: This approach being very advanced, the developers need to have a thorough understanding of JavaScript for using the template. The adaptive templates make sure that only the resources, which are required, can be loaded by client’s device. Moreover, CDN networks make use of most of their caching functionality without upsetting user experience.
- Responsive Website Design
Strength: This is the most popular ‘one web approach’ till date. It uses CSS media queries for modifying the presentation of a website based on the device’s display (screen size). The main benefit of RWD is that designers can make use of just one template for all the devices, and use CSS for determining how the content is rendered on varying screen sizes. There are even some shortcuts available to developers in order to provide a great responsive design.
Weakness: To go responsive, website development companies need to rebuild the site completely. The design, as well as, the testing stage may get a bit fussy as it’s hard to customize the user experience for all kind of devices. These designs work best in combination with a ‘mobile-first’ approach. Performance may also be a concern for the responsive websites in some cases.
No matter what, responsive designs are fast becoming the de facto standard nowadays! Today, most businesses prefer responsive (dynamic) designs over standard (static) interfaces that are viewable across all wireless devices, be it laptops, tablets, or smartphones without a glitch. It is only a matter a time before responsive web design will rule the roost.