Are you a business owner willing to create website to improve your online presence? Your web designer will first ask you to choose between mobile web design and responsive design. The total number of traffic and the client conversion rates that your site achieves is dependent on your selection of the right web design. Compare and contrast the essential aspects of these two types of design and then select one that caters to your requirement perfectly.
Total cost
Those who are willing to start the businesses, the initial start-up price become the integral part of marketing strategy. Considering the reduced time as well as simplicity, the price of creating mobile website is much less than creating responsive variant. The small owners of business who wish to create a mobile website often pay negligible amount. Responsive design, on other hand, requires substantial amount of optimization, testing and coding. In addition, the coding price per hour is significantly higher than the responsive web design. Overall, the initial price for responsive design is high. The mobile web design is the best option for small businesses who wish to focus only on cost.
Redesigning as well as maintenance
Maintenance cost is the major decisive factor in your choice between mobile web and responsive web design. As the term suggests, the mobile web requires good maintenance. It happens due the changing trends of Smartphones. If trends and technology change frequently, redesigning the mobile website is a bit expensive. Compared to mobile web, maintenance cost for responsive web is less costly. The blend of media queries and fluid grids helps you to maintain design easily. In addition, this smart blending also helps the overall redesigning process of responsive web is fast and simple.
Impact
The owners of business ensure that they create the biggest impact with only a handful of resources. Efficiency is a prime factor in this matter. Both responsive web design and mobile design offer different impact. For example, the mobile web offers easy and simple navigation and also fast loading times for the Smartphone users. However the online users can use wide-ranging platforms such as personal computer, laptops and tablets.
Navigation
It is easier to have single HTML or CSS codebase than two individual codebase that the owner would need for mobile sites. However the codebase of responsive web design is complicated and can be handled by those who are expert in front-end web development. Also there is hardly any requirement to redirect for server-side to let the users to right website. The redirects are tricky and also call for expertise in configuration of server software.
Return on Investment (ROI)
For all businesses especially the small traders, high ROI is always the highest priority. With low maintenance and redesign cost, bigger functionality and highest impact across the increasing number of devices and platform, it is quite evident that the responsive design offers higher ROI. On the contrary, low start-up price, simplicity as well as high efficiency on the Smartphones, the mobile web design provides a relatively low ROI. Due to certain restrictions such as single screen size targeting, maintenance cost, the mobile web design offers comparatively lower Return on Investment, especially on long term basis.
Content creation
While responsive web automatically formats the content of the screen for mobile system, it is understood that the mobile user always expects something unique from a site that he or she visits. For example, a user of smartphone can visit a site only to know address, telephone number or email address of the business owner. However a responsive web device user intends to go a step ahead. He or she tries to find out the location-based offers or even try to purchase items from online store of the service provider.
Technologies
With separate website, the mobile users can take their browsing experience to a new high that are just not restricted CSS or HTML codes. For example, the navigation, writing style and content are different for the mobile users. No unanimous techniques are used. Plus, the mobile users load only assets that the mobile users require, thereby resulting in quicker load times. According to the experts, separate mobile site uses up-to-date front end techniques as well as features that usually are not compatible with browsers that are used for desktop computers.
Conclusion
To sum up, a mobile web undoubtedly allows you to interact and stay connected with other customers in more effective manner. The year 2014, mobile web design is anticipated to experience an increase in importance. However a responsive web design could also be beneficial for you since it reduces the maintenance cost in long run as well as adjusts itself to cater to the requirements of a huge number of mobile users. Provided that you have requisite financial and technical resources available, it would be desirable to get responsive web design for the business site. With difference in functionality, price, impact, design and other features, you must ensure that they should go for right web design.