Everyone in business nowadays knows that you need a great website to entice customers. But did you know that most of them are going to be browsing your website on their smartphone before making a purchasing decision?
34% of online retail purchases are happening on customer’s mobile devices. Thus, it would seem that making sure that your website is mobile-friendly would be key. But that’s not all.
The types of devices people use depend on the time of day that they are using them. They are going to be using their smartphones while they are commuting, their laptops while at work, and their tablets after dinner as they relax.
This means that your website has to be built to accommodate all types of devices and myriad screen sizes.
Does this mean that you need to focus on making sure that your website looks the same on all devices? Let’s look further at the two kinds of website designs.
Responsive Vs. Adaptive Design
11-12% of websites nowadays are responsive, i.e., you build one website and it responds to the types of devices to accommodate the screen size and changes accordingly.
Responsive web design is less time-consuming, as you build one website, and it automatically adjusts itself to the different screen sizes.
The con with responsive web design is that you have no control over how the website looks on the different types of devices. This means that you might have your website looking completely different on the tablet vs the smartphones.
This changes website interaction, which might be something you are concerned about.
With adaptive web design, you build 6 different website designs for six common screen widths, i.e., 320, 480, 760, 960, 1200, 1600. This means a bit of extra work for you on the front end, but also a whole lot more control on the website interaction.
Which Web Design To Choose for Different Types of Devices
If you are building a website from scratch, you are probably going to end up using responsive web design. But if you have a website that’s been around for a while, then your best choice would be to go with an adaptive web design.
As this blog post from BidClips says, you are going to rank higher on Google if you have a mobile-friendly website, but mobile screen size seems to change from year to year. Does this mean that you would have to build a new website every year?
If you are not interested in the extra work, a responsive web design is the best way to go.
Improve Website Interaction by Building Many Device Friendly Websites
The choice is easy for anyone who is a newbie at this. Instead of complicating things, pick a responsive theme from your CMS, and breeze through the setup.
But if you are worried about load times, and website interaction, look into the types of devices your customers use and build different websites based on that.
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