Thursday 30 October 2014

Pros and Cons of Web Design Approaches: Responsive vs. Adaptive

As we knew it already, we’re living in a post-PC world making way for more of smart phones where responsive and adaptive design techniques rule the day. How do we deal with this tectonic shift in user behaviour?

Currently, there are three popular approaches to developing a website:

> Responsive Web Design
> Client-Side Adaptive Designs And
> Server-Side Adaptive Designs

Each has its own strengths and weaknesses and considering both ends will help your developers to pick the one that works for next project.

Responsive Web Design

The most common One Web approach, Responsive Web Design uses CSS media queries to modify the presentation of a website based on the size of the device display.

Advantages Of responsive Web Design

> Designers can use a single template for all devices, and just use CSS to determine how content is rendered on different screen sizes.

> Designers can work in HTML and CSS technologies they’re already familiar with.

> With the growing number of responsive-friendly, open-source toolkits like Bootstrap or Foundation- the entire process become simplified.

Weakness To A Sound Responsive Design

> Testing phase can be quite fussy as it can be difficult to customize the user experience for every possible device or context.

Adaptive design

Based on the principles of responsive design, an Adaptive design uses JavaScript to enrich websites with advanced functionality and customization. There are two varied approaches in this:

> Client-Side Adaptive Approach- Let’s you rebuild your site on existing content while still delivering a mobile-responsive layout.

> Server-Side Adaptive Approach- Offers distinct templates for each devices for extended customization, thus enabling smaller mobile pages that load faster

Strengths of the Adaptive Templating Approach


> Ability to reuse one set of HTML and JavaScript across devices thus simplifying change management and testing.

> Numerous server-side plugins available for common CMSs and eCommerce systems such as Magento

Weakness of Adaptive Templating Approach

> Requires significant changes to your back-end systems that might result in a lengthy (and costly) implementation

Summing up, the increasing competition and mobile traffic are still wrestling with the basics of responsive. It is fast becoming super nova, yet optimizing to mobile performance creates new challenges for shopping carts development.

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