A Simple Look into Adaptive and Responsive Web Design

Image source: Unsplash

Nowadays, mobile-friendly websites are dominating the online world. The main reason is that mobile traffic has greatly increased over the years, and it has long surpassed the traffic generated by desktop devices.

Everyone uses a mobile device to browse the Internet today and websites that aren’t mobile-friendly will lose a lot of traffic and many prospects. That said, it’s time to redesign your website if you haven’t gotten to it already.

Ever since Google launched their mobile-first indexing update for their algorithm, mobile-friendly websites have ranked better and become more visible. Fortunately, you no longer have to maintain two versions of your website: one for mobile and the other for desktop devices.

This is where adaptive and responsive web designs come into play. Using either of these two design models is beneficial, but they are, indeed, fundamentally different. With that in mind, let’s have a quick look into adaptive and responsive web designs so that you can choose the best option for your website.

The importance of adaptive and responsive web design

The key to having a mobile-friendly website is to implement either an adaptive or responsive design. When you look at a web page on your PC, everything should be well-aligned, and the majority of the web page’s visual elements should be clearly visible on your monitor.

Now, let’s take that same web page and look at it on a much smaller screen like the ones on tablets and smartphones. Without a proper design that adjusts the page to the viewing screen size, you’d see a complete mess and navigating the page would be nothing short of frustrating.

That’s why adaptive and responsive designs are of vital importance. They decrease the web page’s size and adapt the layout to accommodate the mobile device screen. Without these two, websites would, indeed, have a very difficult time in becoming mobile-friendly.

The difference between the two designs

As mentioned before, adaptive and responsive designs are both viable options if you want a mobile-friendly website.

However, they are fundamentally different in how they’re created or programmed, if you will. This difference may affect user experience in more ways than one.

Moreover, choosing which design is more suited for your website depends on your goals and what you ultimately want to do with your website. To keep things simple, here are a few basic differences between the adaptive and responsive designs.

Responsive web design

• It’s straightforward and fluid.
• Changes the design pattern to accommodate the screen size.
• Content moves dynamically to arrange itself optimally for the browsing window (i.e., screen size).
• It uses CSS media queries to change styles.
• It shows content based on the available space in your browser.

Adaptive web design

• Uses multiple fixed layouts to accommodate the screen size.
• It chooses the corresponding layout based on available space.
• Resize has no impact on the design.
• Adapts to six common screen widths (320, 480, 760, 960, 1200 and 1600 pixels).
• Layouts don’t respond, but they are loaded instead.

As you can see, both web design models adapt to screen sizes accordingly but how they adapt is significantly different.

Choosing an adaptive design

An adaptive design is a bit more difficult to create and manage, but it offers a lot more control when creating a specific layout design for specific screen size. As mentioned before, an adaptive design uses static or fixed templates for appropriate screen width, which means you have to create at least six templates to accommodate the most common screen sizes.

This requires much more work, but the end result is a flawless design created to provide the best possible user experience. When a user loads your website, the adaptive design detects screen size and uses the best layout for that screen.

To create such layouts, however, you have to be an experienced designer. Still, you can choose any design layout based on various methods, such as material design, for example, to create specific adaptive templates.

In other words, you can create tailor-made solutions. That said, the content doesn’t “flow” from desktop to mobile version like with responsive design, but instead, it loads a pre-made solution that’s custom-made for a particular device or screen size. This gives you more freedom to tailor to customer expectations, needs and demands.

Choosing a responsive design

Responsive design is more popular and commonly used by websites today. The main reason is that it’s easier to create, work with and implement. You can even choose a pre-existing template created in CMS (Content Management System), such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.

Furthermore, if you don’t prefer third-party templates, you can always create your own or find a reliable web design company to help you do so. For example, there’s a great design agency in Miami that can handle both design methods. In any event, a responsive design is suited for less experienced designers because it doesn’t require much effort to make or properly implement.

However, playing with media queries and resizing can quickly turn out to be much more complex than you might expect. The main reason is that you don’t have a lot of control when using a responsive design. If you don’t perform a lot of testing with various browsers and devices, your pages’ content can easily get messed up.

Another thing about responsive design is that online consumers are familiar with the layout and are happy with it. Choosing this web design model for your mobile-friendly website will be well-received by your audience.

Image source: Unsplash

Which web design option is better?

Many website owners wonder about which option is better. The fact of the matter is that both options are equally good. Of course, both responsive and adaptive designs have their unique advantages and disadvantages.

The important thing is that they can both deliver exceptional results. The results will vary, depending on your needs and goals. Moreover, it depends on your audience’s size and the number of devices being used to access your website.

For example, if your website favors traffic from just desktop and smartphone users, you may choose to go with a responsive design instead of creating two adaptive templates. However, if your goal is to impress your audience and ensure their engagement, adaptive templates may be a more viable solution.

In any case, the important thing is to take the time to consider both options and evaluate them equally. Don’t rush your decision because changing from one design to another can be a tricky business, and you’d be better off avoiding that scenario altogether.

Having a mobile-friendly website today is of the utmost importance. Mobile traffic is simply way too significant to be ignored, not to mention that search engines favor mobile-friendly websites.

If you want more traffic, conversions, sales, or whatever else, you will need a well-designed, mobile-friendly website. Whether you’ll go for a responsive or adaptive design to achieve that is entirely up to you. Just make sure you check out both design models thoroughly before you make your decision.