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Responsive Web Design or Adaptive Web Design – Which to choose?

You don’t have to be a digital marketing geek to understand how quickly the mobile web browsing trend has caught up in recent times. Some of the recent studies reveal that the web traffic coming from the mobile platform represents more than 15% of the total visitors and it is increasing. So what does this mean for you? Well, it’s a wake up call if you haven’t done anything to target mobile web browsers. Since the number of mobile web users has increased so dramatically, you need to develop a mobile version of your website for your target audience to keep them connected, on the go!

What should you do?
To appeal to your general web audience, you can have a different website for mobile as well as desktop, tablet, and iPads. This will work fine as long as you have enough time and patience to update all versions regularly. But having a website developed for each individual device and keeping them up to date is a big test and ideally, you should have a website, running on a CMS, that readjusts on different screen sizes of different devices. In this paper, you can adopt two proven techniques: Responsive Web Design (RWD) and Adaptive Web Design (AWD). Although there are certain similarities between the two techniques, they differ in several ways.

What is Responsive Web Design?
Responsive web design has been a fad, but a trend that has been around for quite some time. In a nutshell, responsive design refers to a web design where the content, images, and other design elements remain the same, but are immediately scaled down to fit the specific screen size. In the responsive type, the content can be managed from a CMS and it is a quick, easy and cost-effective solution that can be implemented without any hassle.

However, if your website has large files like high-resolution images and videos, it will take too long to load on a mobile device and this is where responsive design comes in.

What is Responsive Web Design?
Adaptive design is a rather newer concept in the industry. Essentially, this technique adapts to what is displayed on the devices, depending on the capabilities of the devices and the size of their screen. In this form of web layout, although the content remains the same, there are certain changes that appear in the design elements, depending on whether users access the site from a desktop computer or through a mobile device or tablet. . In the adaptive type, varied layouts are used, including some ‘Responsive’ elements, which reduces the number of different templates. In extreme notions, responsive layouts completely reframe content and fit/remove excess images and video files.

Responsive design for the web has not yet become popular in the industry, but the concept is really looking for new heights in the times to come. The ultimate goal is to enrich the user experience, to the fullest. However, there are certain disadvantages to the practice of AWD.

• Responsive websites cost more compared to responsive designs
• AWD can ruin the entire look of the website if not supported by proper planning.
• Since AWD readjusts the design elements and even reworks the content, it can bring brand inconsistencies and confuse your target audience when they see different interfaces on different devices.

So what is The Bottomline?
While responsive design can be the perfect solution that simplifies the information provided on a website by adjusting to different screen sizes, adaptive type is much more user-centric. In the coming years, more than 50% of web users will use their mobile devices to browse the web, and therefore it is better to combine adaptive web design techniques with responsive elements to take advantage of web visibility, attract targeted visitors and take advantage of the conversion ratio.

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