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Fully responsive or dedicated mobile?
After the initial wave of people championing the fully responsive website, there seems to have been a gradual shift back to a middle ground of serving a separate mobile site (usually on a dedicated subdomain). A few high profile retailers like Marks and Spencer and John Lewis have reverted to a fixed-width(ish) desktop design and an m-dot mobile version which is fully responsive to cater for tablets. Well, the John Lewis case seems to utilise lower quality images that don’t scale up past 500px without jaggies. Whether there’s a dedicated tablet site or not as well, I don’t know at present.
Currys (using max-width) and Firebox on the other hand have stuck with a single, fully responsive design.
Anyway, I’m just wondering what the views are of all you clever designer folks. To me, a lowly programmer, I find the fully responsive idea more natural and pleasing, even if it is a fair bit of work.
A major(?) disadvantage I can see of the dedicated mobile design — aside from managing two separate sites — is that you need to do some jiggery pokery to ensure that link sharing works reliably. I find it annoying to share a site link from a phone, which if clicked from the recipient’s desktop produces a badly-scaled mobile version of the content. Some kind of user agent / device viewport sniffing could do bi-directional redirects of course, to make sure the right version was viewed on the right device, but it’s a hassle and I think slightly unfriendly to visitors. Also, what do twin sites do for canonical links? And SEO? The John Lewis site has two sets of different canonical links, even though the mobile URL seems to contain a copy of the desktop URL after the /mt/ (mobile-tablet?) portion. Confusing, and I haven’t yet figured out why, nor what benefit it serves.
But I recognise that being able to serve dedicated images for the target device type from a subdomain is probably a speed benefit and reduces reliance on Javascript detection or media queries to serve large versions at wider viewports.
Hopefully some smarter folk than me can give some insight into the apparent shift away from fully responsive in some cases, even after companies had already invested significant resource into creating a responsive design in the first place. The third advantage given here for dedicated sites only applies for those that have an existing, static site. But in the two cases I cited above, I believe they both invested in fully responsive first, then moved to a two-site design. So there must be a payback somewhere that I haven’t considered. Thoughts on this? Is it largely site dependent? Maybe just a retail thing? Which approach do you favour, and why?
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Re: Fully responsive or dedicated mobile?
Depends on the type of website really. I can see lots of good reasons why you’d produce a separate dedicated mobile site, especially for e-commerce. The user interface and user experience could be so radically different between mobile and desktop (and also tablet to a certain degree) that trying to share code between them would become more of a hinderance than any benefit it gives.
The images aren’t really an issue now though as we have img srcset and things like the Picturefill polyfill (which I’ll use on the Textpattern.com site re-do if you want a demo).
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Re: Fully responsive or dedicated mobile?
Interestingly Apple has a bit of both. For desktops and tablets the site is the same, for small screens, such as iPhones the layout becomes more responsive but, interestingly, the menu is not.
In short, I would not go for a dedicated mobile site, but I would go for a max width layout (possibly 960px) with a responsive layout To allow for smaller screens. I guess the same would be nice for the admin side too.
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Re: Fully responsive or dedicated mobile?
colak wrote #284114:
I guess the same would be nice for the admin side too.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d always use a single responsive site where it makes sense (including the Textpattern admin side which I’m currently improving for mobile). I can just see why companies like John Lewis would decide on a dedicated mobile site for their kind of business.
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