Making sure your website is well designed to perform well on all devices and screen sizes is an important factor for any business or company. Google’s “mobile first” algorithm is applied to users accessing search using a mobile device, and promotes better mobile websites over others. This means that without a good mobile website, your company could lose out on website traffic, as well as the opportunity to increases sales, bookings and signups. At the same time, your website users will have specific expectations about the quality of your mobile website, and this should be central to your mobile web design practices. One way to achieve an effective mobile design is to use adaptive web design. But what is this? And what are the advantages of adaptive web design? Well, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester, we are Manchester’s leading web design experts, and we provide high quality, effective, web design solutions for a range of local companies and businesses across Manchester, and the surrounding area. This includes Blackburn and Stockport. As a result, we have produced this guide to everything you should know about adaptive web design.
What is adaptive web design?
Adaptive web design is a web design technique that involves applying a predefined set of layout sizes based on the size of the device screen, so that the website will look great, and work efficiently regardless of the size of the device. This uses information about the users device and system capabilities, CSS and Javascript, as well as HTML, to structure the page, and create a positive user experience. Ultimately, it means that many different versions of your website will be created for different screen sizes, instead of simply reordering the content or resizing the content to fit the screen, which is what happens in responsive design.
What are the advantages of adaptive web design?
The advantages of using this type of web design to secure an effective mobile web browsing experience include:
- Faster loading times- your users won’t be waiting around for your website to load with an adaptive mobile website. Instead the website will only load the information and features necessary for their device. This means that in general, an adaptive website takes less time to load than a responsive website.
- Improved user experience- because an adaptive website shows users only what they need to see, on each type of mobile device, each aspect is specifically tailored to the individual requirements. From the size and resolution of the images, to the layout and structure, the user experience is at the centre of all design decisions.
What are the dis-advantages of adaptive web design?
For a balanced view, here are the biggest disadvantages to adaptive web design:
- Increased maintenance- because new device screen sizes are being created all the time, the adaptive layouts will need to keep being changed and altered to fit new technology. This can mean an increase in the level of maintenance work required. Especially when compared to responsive design.
- Increased cost- the increase in maintenance tends to lead to an overall increase in cost, when compared to responsive web design.
For more information or advice, or for high quality, professional web design solutions, get in touch with the experts today, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester.